Oceans will determine if we sink or swim when it comes to achieving our climate goals
Oceans don’t only provide a livelihood for fishers around the world, such as those pictured above in Ghana, but they also absorb a lion’s share of human-cased fossil fuel emissions. Photo by Seyiram Kweku / Unsplash
By Rochelle Baker
The world's oceans suck up a huge chunk of human-caused emissions, but their role in mitigation strategies and targets is largely absent from critical negotiations underway at the UN climate conference in Glasgow, Canadian scientist Anya Waite says.
A massive carbon sink, the oceans are doing much of the “heavy lifting,” sopping up as much as 40 per cent of our fossil fuel emissions over the past 200 years, said Waite, CEO of the Ocean Frontier Institute (OFI) at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.
“If the ocean wasn’t there, we’d already be burning up,” said Waite, who attended COP26 as co-chair of the international Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) and as a delegate for the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), the UN entity supporting global ocean science and services.
The oceans have also absorbed more than 90 per cent of the excess heat caused by greenhouse gases (GHGs) — storing heat equal to that in the Earth’s entire atmosphere in its top few metres.
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