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Deadzones Advantage

1AC Deadzones Advantage

Deadzone prevalence is the highest its been in 300 million years---this makes mass extinction of species inevitable without change

Harvey 10/2/2013 [Fiona Harvey, “Rate of ocean acidification due to carbon emissions is at the highest for 300m years”, The Guardian, October 2, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/03/ocean-acidification-carbon-dioxide-emissions-levels]

The oceans are becoming more acidic at the fastest rate in 300m years, due to carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, and a mass extinction of key species may already be almost inevitable as a result, leading marine scientists warned on Thursday. An international audit of the health of the oceans has found that overfishing and pollution are also contributing to the crisis, in a deadly combination of destructive forces that are imperilling marine life, on which billions of people depend for their nutrition and livelihood. In the starkest warning yet of the threat to ocean health, the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) said: "This [acidification] is unprecedented in the Earth's known history. We are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change, and exposing organisms to intolerable evolutionary pressure. The next mass extinction may have already begun." It published its findings in the State of the Oceans report, collated every two years from global monitoring and other research studies. Alex Rogers, professor of biology at Oxford University, said: "The health of the ocean is spiralling downwards far more rapidly than we had thought. We are seeing greater change, happening faster, and the effects are more imminent than previously anticipated. The situation should be of the gravest concern to everyone since everyone will be affected by changes in the ability of the ocean to support life on Earth." Coral is particularly at risk. Increased acidity dissolves the calcium carbonate skeletons that form the structure of reefs, and increasing temperatures lead to bleaching where the corals lose symbiotic algae they rely on. The report says that world governments' current pledges to curb carbon emissions would not go far enough or fast enough to save many of the world's reefs. There is a time lag of several decades between the carbon being emitted and the effects on seas, meaning that further acidification and further warming of the oceans are inevitable, even if we drastically reduce emissions very quickly. There is as yet little sign of that, with global greenhouse gas output still rising. Corals are vital to the health of fisheries, because they act as nurseries to young fish and smaller species that provide food for bigger ones. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by the seas – at least a third of the carbon that humans have released has been dissolved in this way, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – and makes them more acidic. But IPSO found the situation was even more dire than that laid out by the world's top climate scientists in theirlandmark report last week. In absorbing carbon and heat from the atmosphere, the world's oceans have shielded humans from the worst effects of global warming, the marine scientists said. This has slowed the rate of climate change on land, but its profound effects on marine life are only now being understood. Acidification harms marine creatures that rely on calcium carbonate to build coral reefs and shells, as well as plankton, and the fish that rely on them. Jane Lubchenco, former director of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a marine biologist, said the effects were already being felt in some oyster fisheries, where young larvae were failing to develop properly in areas where the acid rates are higher, such as on the west coast of the US. "You can actually see this happening," she said. "It's not something a long way into the future. It is a very big problem." But the chemical changes in the ocean go further, said Rogers. Marine animals use chemical signals to perceive their environment and locate prey and predators, and there is evidence that their ability to do so is being impaired in some species. Trevor Manuel, a South African government minister and co-chair of the Global Ocean Commission, called the report "a deafening alarm bell on humanity's wider impacts on the global oceans". "Unless we restore the ocean's health, we will experience the consequences on prosperity, wellbeing and development. Governments must respond as urgently as they do to national security threats – in the long run, the impacts are just as important," he said. Current rates of carbon release into the oceans are 10 times faster than those before the last major species extinction, which was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum extinction, about 55m years ago. The IPSO scientists can tell that the current ocean acidification is the highest for 300m years from geological records. They called for strong action by governments to limit carbon concentrations in the atmosphere to no more than 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent. That would require urgent and deep reductions in fossil fuel use. No country in the world is properly tackling overfishing, the report found, and almost two thirds are failing badly. At least 70 per cent of the world's fish populations are over-exploited. Giving local communities more control over their fisheries, and favouring small-scale operators over large commercial vessels would help this, the report found. Subsidies that drive overcapacity in fishing fleets should also be eliminated, marine conservation zones set up and destructive fishing equipment should be banned. There should also be better governance of the areas of ocean beyond countries' national limits. The IPSO report also found the oceans were being "deoxygenated" – their average oxygen content is likely to fall by as much as 7 per cent by 2100, partly because of the run-off of fertilisers and sewage into the seas, and also as a side-effect of global warming. The reduction of oxygen is a concern as areas of severe depletion become effectively dead. Rogers said: "People are just not aware of the massive roles that the oceans play in the Earth's systems. Phytoplankton produce 40 per cent of the oxygen in the atmosphere, for example, and 90 per cent of all life is in the oceans. Because the oceans are so vast, there are still areas we have never really seen. We have a very poor grasp of some of the biochemical processes in the world's biggest ecosystem." The five chapters of which the State of the Oceans report is a summary have been published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, a peer-reviewed journal.

Dead zones destroy biodiversity---only federal action can solve

Atkinson and Howarth 2000 [David R. Atkinson-Professor of Ecology and Environmental Biology at Cornell University and Robert Howarth-Ph.D., “Bringing Coastal Dead Zones Back to Life”, September 2000, http://www.actionbioscience.org/environment/howarth.html]

It’s springtime, and everything seems to be blooming. Unfortunately, this isn’t good news for the Gulf of Mexico, just off the Louisiana and Texas coasts. Each spring, the area turns into a “dead zone.” What is a “dead zone”? Agriculture and industry produce too much nitrogen and phosphorous. Excessive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus — which make their way to the Gulf from the atmosphere and via rivers polluted with agricultural runoff and municipal and industrial waste — trigger algal blooms. The algae use up available oxygen, killing bottom-dwellers such as oysters, clams, and snails, and driving away fish, shrimp, and crabs. Excess nitrogen is particularly harmful for marine ecosystems, and can be linked to everything from increased outbreaks of red tides to the deaths of marine mammals and the loss of biodiversity. Dead zones are areas that cannot sustain marine life. And it isn’t just the Gulf area that is affected by an overabundance of nitrogen and phosphorus. All of our coasts are being damaged. Of 139 U.S. coastal areas assessed recently, 44 were identified as severely affected by high levels of these nutrients. What’s more, many scientists predict that the problem will worsen in the coming decades unless action is taken now to reduce nutrient excesses in U.S. waters. Only national policies can stop nutrient pollution of oceans and waterways. Who or what is responsible? State and local governments often are responsible for identifying and dealing with nutrient pollution, and their efforts can significantly improve coastal environmental quality. But state and local agencies can’t do it all, and they certainly can’t do it alone. To truly protect our coasts, rivers, and lakes, our nation needs a comprehensive strategy to prevent excessive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus from entering our waterways. Nutrient pollution is a complex problem that is taking on ever-larger proportions.

OMEGA solves dead zones-cleans wastewater that kills the ocean

Wiley 13 [Patrick Edward Wiley-Ph.D., Environmental Systems from UC Merced, “Microalgae Cultivation using Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae (OMEGA)”, 2013, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0586c8p5#page-62]

The OMEGA system cultivates microalgae using wastewater contained in PBR modules deployed offshore. This approach eliminates competition with agriculture for land and nutrients, while enabling co-location with large wastewater treatment facilities constructed in coastal urban areas. The surrounding ocean water provides structural support, temperature regulation and could produce a “simulated reef” that enriches local species diversity. The osmotic gradient between the PBR contents and the surrounding seawater can be used to drive forward osmosis, which is effective at concentrating nutrients, dewatering microalgae and producing clean water. An OMEGA deployment of this scale may also have beneficial effects for coastal communities. The OMEGA system would remove nutrients from the wastewater that is currently discharged into coastal waters and may thereby mitigate “dead-zone” formation. The infrastructure would provide substrate, refugia, and habitat for an extensive community of sessile and associated organisms (44). It is known that introduced surfaces in the marine environment become colonized and can form “artificial reefs” or act as “fish aggregating devices,” which increase local species diversity and expand the food web (45, 46). A large-scale deployment of OMEGA systems may also act as floating “turf scrubbers” and function to absorb anthropogenic pollutants, improving coastal water quality (47).

Ocean dead zones cause mass extinctions-evidence from Jurassic era proves

University of Liverpool 11/25/2013 [University of Liverpool, “Oceanic ‘dead zones’ and Jurassic extinction”, November 25, 2013 http://phys.org/news/2013-11-oceanic-dead-zones-jurassic-extinction.html]

Data collected by a scientist now at the University of Liverpool has predicted a dramatic decline in the size of marine animals used as food by humans, due to reduced oxygen levels in the oceans. Dr Bryony Caswell, from the University's School of Environmental Sciences, in collaboration with Dr Angela Coe at the Open University, studied over 36,000 fossilised clam shells from northern England. These clams date from a short period near the beginning of the Jurassic (183 million years ago) which featured climatic change and declining oxygen levels in the seas, similar to that occurring today. Ocean dead zones Over 7% of the world's oceans are classed as low oxygen zones or 'ocean dead zones'.  This figure has grown dramatically over the last 50 years, caused by increasing levels of pollution and accelerating climate change. Other recently published studies have shown that low oxygen reduces organism size and have predicted that under our current emissions scenario this will to lead to a decrease in the body size of individual marine animals of around 25% by 2050. The fossil study, which took place in Whitby, Yorkshire, found a reduction in the size of the 183-million-year-old-clams as oxygen in the water diminished.  These changes affected ocean chemistry, which in turn affected the clams' algal food supply and the rest of the food chain – leading to a decrease in biodiversity and the average body size of clams. This process has important ramifications for today's marine life, and for the humans which feed on it.  Around 14% of the animal protein consumed today comes from the oceans, and with projections from this study foreseeing a decline of mean shellfish size of up to 50%, it could mean a significant food source for a growing population is now in decline. Declining oxygen levels Dr Caswell, said: "By examining changes in the oceans that happened millions of years ago we are able to piece together more of the picture of what is likely to happen in our own time as a result of declining oxygen levels."

Algae is key and status quo efforts fail

Matteo, Anna. "Killer 'Dead Zone' Grows in the Gulf of Mexico." VOA. VOA, 31 May 2014. Web. 15 July 2014. .

Coming up we hear about a dead zone in waters near the United States. This dead zone has nothing to do with burial places, zombies or monsters or that 1983 movie called “The Dead Zone.” Christopher Cruise tells us what a dead zone is and how some scientists are trying to bring it back to life.¶ The area known as a dead zone develops every spring in the Gulf of Mexico near the mouth of the Mississippi River. It can be as large as 13,600 square kilometers, extending all the way to the eastern Texas shoreline. Scientists know what causes this dead zone, and a new study suggests an answer. But the solution might be hard to accept for those who live far away from the coastline. Bayani Cardenas is a professor of water studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He wondered why natural cleaning, or filtration, does not remove nitrates from the Mississippi River that create the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. He says rivers generally filter out materials like nitrates. "You can think of it as a spiraling flow back around the bank of the river, where a water molecule goes into the bank, comes back out into the river at some downstream point, and it does that repeatedly as it travels downstream." Professor Cardenas says his recent study shows that more than 99 percent of the river’s water does pass through the river bank material, or sediments, on its way south. But he adds that the river system is simply overwhelmed by the amount of nitrogen it carries. This nitrogen-rich water supports the growth of algae. As the algae dies, it sinks to the bottom where it breaks down, or decomposes, taking oxygen from the water. This condition is called hypoxia and is deadly to fish and shrimp.¶ The Mississippi river system carries water to the gulf from 33 states and two Canadian provinces. Along the way, chemicals like nitrogen that are used in farming enter the river system. Farmers say the chemicals are necessary. But Mr. Cardenas thinks that the only way to fix the dead zone problem is for farmers to use less nitrates.

Biodiversity loss causes human extinction

Chivian 2011 [Eric Chivian-MD from Harvard Medical School and Director of Project on Global Environmental Change and Health, “Species Extinction, Biodiversity Loss, and Human Health”, 2011, http://www.ilo.org/oshenc/part-vii/environmental-health-hazards/item/505-species-extinction-biodiversity-loss-and-human-health]

Human activity is causing the extinction of animal, plant and microbial species at rates that are a thousand times greater than those which would have occurred naturally (Wilson l992), approximating the largest extinctions in geological history. When homo sapiens evolved, some l00 thousand years ago, the number of species that existed was the largest ever to inhabit the Earth (Wilson l989). Current rates of species loss are reducing these levels to the lowest since the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, with estimates that one-fourth of all species will become extinct in the next 50 years (Ehrlich and Wilson l99l). In addition to the ethical issues involved - that we have no right to kill off countless other organisms, many of which came into being tens of millions of years prior to our arrival - this behaviour is ultimately self-destructive, upsetting the delicate ecological balance on which all life depends, including our own, and destroying the biological diversity that makes soils fertile, creates the air we breathe and provides food and other life-sustaining natural products, most of which remain to be discovered. Sharks Like bears, many species of sharks are being decimated because of the demand for shark meat, especially in Asia, where shark fins for soup command prices as high as $l00 a pound (Stevens l992). Because sharks produce few offspring, grow slowly and take years to mature, they are highly vulnerable to overfishing. Sharks have been around for almost 400 million years and have evolved highly specialized organs and physiological functions that have protected them against virtually all threats, except slaughter by humans. The wiping out of populations and extinction of some of the 350 species may become a major disaster for human beings. The immune systems of sharks (and of their relatives, skates and rays) seem to have evolved so that the animals are almost invulnerable to developing cancers and infections. While tumours are often seen in other fish and molluscs (Tucker l985), they are rare in sharks. Preliminary investigations have supported this finding. It has proved impossible, for example, to produce tumour growth in Nurse Sharks with repeated injections of known potent carcinogenic substances (Stevens l992). And researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have isolated a substance, present in large amounts, from Basking Shark cartilage (Lee and Langer l983) that strongly inhibits the growth of new blood vessels towards solid tumours, and thereby prevents tumour growth. Sharks may also provide valuable models for developing new types of medications to treat infections, especially important at the present time when infectious agents are developing increasing resistance to currently available antibiotics. Other models Countless other examples could be mentioned of unique plants, animals and micro-organisms holding the secrets of billions of evolutionary experiments that are increasingly threatened by human activity and in danger of being lost forever to medical science. The Loss of New Medicines Plant, animal and microbial species are themselves the sources for some of today’s most important medicines and make up a significant proportion of the total pharmacopoeia. Farnsworth (1990), for example, has found that 25% of all prescriptions dispensed from community pharmacies in the United States from l959 to l980 contained active ingredients extracted from higher plants. A much higher percentage is found in the developing world. As many as 80% of all people living in developing countries, or roughly two thirds of the world’s population, rely almost exclusively on traditional medicines using natural substances, mostly derived from plants. The knowledge held by traditional healers, often passed down orally over centuries, has led to the discovery of many medicines that are widely used today - quinine, physostigmine, d-tubocurarine, pilocarpine and ephedrine, to name a few (Farnsworth et al. l985). But that knowledge is fast disappearing, particularly in the Amazon, as native healers die out and are replaced by more modern medical practitioners. Botanists and pharmacologists are racing to learn these ancient practices, which, like the forest plants they employ, are also endangered (Farnsworth l990; Schultes l99l; Balick l990). Scientists have analysed the chemistry of less than 1% of known rainforest plants for biologically active substances (Gottlieb and Mors l980) - as well as a similar proportion of temperate plants (Schultes l992) and even smaller percentages of known animals, fungi and microbes. But there may be tens of millions of species as yet undiscovered in the forests, in soils, and in lakes and oceans. With the massive extinctions currently in progress, we may be destroying new cures for incurable cancers, for AIDS, for arteriosclerotic heart disease and for other illnesses that cause enormous human suffering. Disturbing Ecosystem Equilibria Finally, the loss of species and the destruction of habitats may upset delicate equilibria among ecosystems on which all life depends, including our own. Food supplies Food supplies, for one, may be seriously threatened. Deforestation, for example, can result in significantly reduced rainfall in adjacent agricultural areas and even in regions at some distance (Wilson l988; Shulka, Nobre and Sellers l990), compromising crop productivity. The loss of topsoil from erosion, another consequence of deforestation, can have an irreversible negative impact on crops in forested regions, particularly in areas of hilly terrain, such as in regions of Nepal, Madagascar and the Philippines. Bats and birds, among the major predators of insects that infest or eat crops, are being lost in record numbers (Brody l99l; Terborgh 1980), with untold consequences for agriculture. Infectious diseases Recently in Brazil, malaria has reached epidemic proportions as a consequence of massive settlement and environmental disruption of the Amazon basin. Largely under control in Brazil during the l960s, malaria has exploded 20 years later, with 560,000 cases reported in l988, 500,000 in Amazonia alone (Kingman l989). In large part, this epidemic was a consequence of the influx of huge numbers of people who had little or no immunity to malaria, who lived in make-shift shelters and wore little protective clothing. But it was also an outgrowth of their disturbing the environment of the rainforest, creating in their wake stagnant pools of water everywhere - from road construction, from silt runoff secondary to land clearing, and from open mining - pools where Anopheles darlingi, the most important malaria vector in the area, could multiply unchecked (Kingman l989). The story of “emerging” viral illnesses may hold valuable clues for understanding the effects of habitat destruction on human beings. Argentine haemorrhagic fever, for example, a painful viral disease having a mortality of between 3 and l5% (Sanford 1991) has occurred in epidemic proportions since l958 as a result of the widespread clearing of the pampas of central Argentina and the planting of corn (Kingman l989). Other effects But it may be the disruption of other interrelationships among organisms, ecosystems and the global environment, about which almost nothing is known, that may prove the most catastrophic of all for human beings. What will happen to global climate and to the concentration of atmospheric gases, for example, when some critical threshold of deforestation has been reached? Forests play crucial roles in the maintenance of global precipitation patterns and in the stability of atmospheric gases. What will be the effects on marine life if increased ultraviolet radiation causes massive ocean phytoplankton kills, particularly in the rich seas beneath the Antarctic ozone “hole”? These organisms, which are at the base of the entire marine food chain and which produce a significant portion of the world’s oxygen and consume a significant portion of its carbon dioxide, are highly vulnerable to ultraviolet damage (Schneider l99l; Roberts l989; Bridigare l989). Closer to humans, marine mammals such as striped dolphins in the Mediterranean, European harbour seals off the coast of Scandinavia and of northern Ireland, and Beluga whales in the Saint Lawrence River are also dying in record numbers. In the case of the dolphins and the seals, some of the deaths seem to be due to infections by morbilli viruses (the family of viruses including measles and canine distemper virus) causing pneumonias and encephalitides (Domingo and Ferrer l990; Kennedy and Smyth l988), perhaps also the consequence of compromised immune systems. In the case of the whales, chemical pollutants such as DDT, the insecticide Mirex, PCBs, lead and mercury seem to be involved, suppressing the Belugas’ fertility and causing their deaths ultimately by a variety of tumours and pneumonias (Dold l992). The Beluga carcasses were often so filled with these pollutants that they could be classified as hazardous waste. Summary Human activity is causing the extinction of animal, plant and microbial organisms at rates that may well eliminate one-fourth of all species on Earth within the next 50 years. There are incalculable human health consequences from this destruction: the loss of medical models to understand human physiology and disease the loss of new medicines that may successfully treat incurable cancers, AIDS, arteriosclerosis and other diseases that cause great human suffering.