How are the scallops?

The Feast of Saint James the Apostle

St. James Day is here again — time for this blog’s annual look at ocean acidification and its effects on shellfish. The concerns we had last year are still there, but one year farther into increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere that produce both global warming and ocean acidification. The data from the Mauna Loa observatory shows the carbon dioxide concentration for June 2016 averaging 406.81 ppm; the concentration for June 2015 was 402.80. Scientists think that we have now passed 400 ppm permanently; it will never be near the target of 350 ppm in the lifetime of anyone now alive.

Americans are bombarded with political messages this summer as the two major parties hold their conventions. So far, very little has been said about climate change, and its evil twin of ocean acidification seems to be off the political radar screen for the media, an awful lot of politicians, and many voters. Next Sunday’s Gospel lesson (Luke 12: 13-21) warns us against greed, against the accumulation of wealth and possessions with thought for nothing else. The reality of the unsustainability of our world gets dwarfed again and again by our greed, our desire to accumulate more while ignoring — remaining ignorant of — the price we will pay and that our children and grandchildren will continue to pay.

How are the scallops and other shellfish? They are threatened by our failure to put strong controls on carbon dioxide emissions. 

The Paris talks we were anticipating at this time last year are history. The challenge now is to make the targets from these talks more than a nice ideal. The challenge is to take climate change and ocean acidification seriously and to have the will to do what we need to do to significantly and rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This St. James Day is a good time to commit ourselves to advocacy for meaningful public policy to get us — and the shellfish and other living things — a chance at a sustainable future.

Here is last year’s post for the Feast of St. James:

St. James Day and the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Since the scallop shell is a symbol for Saint James, this blog has taken the feast day in the past to look at the future for sea scallops given the increasing acidification of the world’s oceans. [See St James, Scallops, and Drought from 2012 and Feast of St. James: Scallops and their Companions from 2015.] The same carbon pollution that contributes to global warming is also increasing the acidity of the world’s oceans, changing the chemistry of shell production for scallops, oysters, clams, and other shellfish. 

So how is our fight against ocean acidification going? How are the scallops this day, this year, and how are they likely to be in the future? 

When I looked over information about ocean acidification and shellfish from the past few months, the answers to these questions did not surprise me, yet I can’t comprehend them. The scallops are not doing well, and they are likely to do worse in the future. Moreover, the economic impact of the loss of shellfish seems to be growing more apparent to more people. Yet ocean acidification is increasing, not decreasing. We know it is happening, we know a lot about the harmful effects of ocean acidification, but we haven’t done anything significant to stop it. Because we allow all sorts of short-term concerns to prevent significant action on global warming, it’s not surprising that we treat ocean acidification, its evil twin, the same way. But why do we do that? Why do we prioritize our immediate, short-term comfort and our fear of change over the preservation of life? That’s the part I don’t comprehend. 

A new report on research done jointly by NOAA, the University of Alaska, and an Alaskan shellfish hatchery indicates that without mitigation, the ocean waters they studied in Resurrection Bay may not be able to support shellfish hatcheries by 2040, only 25 years from now. Ocean acidification and warming waters also threaten the lobster industry in Maine. Another study released this year looked not only at the vulnerability of the shellfish but also at the social vulnerability of the coastal communities that will be most affected by the loss of shellfish. Several coastal states are looking at changes in policies to mitigate the effects of ocean acidification on the shellfish industry and the communities that depend on the industry economically. 

It’s all very discouraging. However, Joe Romm reported yesterday on the probable end to the global coal boom. China’s use of coal has helped fuel the coal boom, but now awareness both of the health effects of carbon pollution coupled with a growing awareness of the threat of climate change to China’s future has resulted in policy changes to transition away from coal-intensive industries in particular and energy-intensive industries in general. Joe Romm’s post suggests that China’s transition to cleaner energy sources should in turn make clean energy sources more available to developing countries. All of this makes real progress from the Paris climate talks a little more possible: “The Paris talks should also make obvious to all what the world’s top climate scientists and governments already know and have stated publicly: The world has to go to zero total carbon pollution long before 2100 and indeed as close to 2050 as possible — before actually going carbon negative.”

While the focus of the Paris talks is mitigation of climate change, a serious commitment to decreasing carbon pollution will mitigate the evil twin of ocean acidification as well. Will it be enough? Is it worth the attempt?  The Gospel lesson this Sunday morning is John 6:1-21, which includes the version of the miracle of the loaves and the fishes in which a boy offers his five loaves and two fish, an offering that seems too small to feed the crowd but ends up being sufficient. All we can do to save the shellfish and keep climate change somewhere below the catastrophic category is to offer what we have, to make the attempt and find out later whether the attempt was enough. 

We have about four months until the Paris climate talks begin. We can offer our prayers and advocate with our nation’s leaders for a truly significant commitment to phase out carbon pollution soon enough to make a real difference. And even though it's difficult to think about, we can make the effort to learn more about what is happening, talk about it, and pray and reflect on it, and then perhaps find it within ourselves to make it clear to all those in power that preserving life, including preservation of as many ocean species as possible, takes priority over our short-term concerns and our fears of change. 

Feast of St. James: Scallops and their companions

Carlo Crivelli (circa 1435–circa 1495)

July 25 is the Feast of Saint James the Apostle. The scallop is closely associated with St. James — see  Shell of St. James in the Wikipedia article Scallop for possible explanations of the connection —and are traditionally eaten on the feast day, often in the delicious classic dish Coquilles St. Jacques that bears the name of the saint. 

Two years ago I wrote a post St. James, Scallops, and Drought about the stress ocean acidification places on populations of scallops and other shellfish and how the acidification of the oceans connects to other stresses on on other ecosystems. What do we know about this in 2014? 

This has been a difficult year for scallops and the scallop industry in the northwestern United States and British Columbia. In February of this year, the death since 2009 of around 10 millions scallops before they could be harvested resulted in layoffs of workers. (See the CBC article Acidic ocean deadly for Vancouver Island scallop industry.) 

The Seattle Times has put together the Sea Change report, an excellent written and video report that describes what is happening in the Pacific Ocean, showing the connections between what is happening to seafood in the Pacific Northwest and what is happening to coral reefs off the coast of Papua New Guinea and the primary protein source for people in the region. The threat to the Pacific Northwest seafood industry and the people who depend on that for their livelihood is tied to a lessening food supply for rural people on South Pacific islands. 

The same carbon pollution that contributes so much to global warming is the cause of ocean acidification. A side bar to the report notes that we add “the equivalent of a hopper car of coal — about 100 U.S. tons — into the ocean every second.” Even if we set the huge challenge of global warming aside, what is happening to our oceans is reason enough to shift quickly away from the use of fossil fuels as our primary energy source. 

In an announcement last Friday from U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, we learned that the eastern coast of the United States will be opened to oil and gas exploration and to seismic surveys using “sonic cannons” to locate deposits under the ocean floor. (See Obama opens Eastern Seaboard to oil exploration from the Associated Press.) Environmentalists object to the sonic cannons because they harm marine life. Harming marine life in order to make more fossil fuels available, thus increasing the acidity of the ocean and the temperature of the planet, seems especially evil.

One of the most sobering pieces of this report is that the sorts of changes scientists are finding in the Pacific are happening much sooner, at a much faster rate, than predicted:

“I used to think it was kind of hard to make things in the ocean go extinct,” said James Barry of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. “But this change we’re seeing is happening so fast it’s almost instantaneous. I think it might be so important that we see large levels, high rates, of extinction.”

Globally, we can arrest much of the damage if we bring down CO2 soon. But if we do not, the bad news won’t stop. And the longer we wait, the more permanent the change gets.

“There’s a train wreck coming and we are in a position to slow that down and make it not so bad,” said Stephen Palumbi, a professor of evolutionary and marine biology at Stanford University. “But if we don’t start now the wreck will be enormous.”

You might think that would lend the problem urgency. So far, it has not.

St. James was a fisherman. He and his brother John were mending their nets when Jesus called them to follow him. The Eucharistic reading for the Feast of St. James is Matthew 20: 20-28. In this passage, the mother of James and John asks Jesus to give her sons places right next to him in his kingdom. Jesus replies, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?”, and the brothers reply, “We are able.” 

Jesus asks whether they are able to stick with following him when discipleship becomes even more difficult. Can the Church stick with following Jesus when the right thing to do is to work for an end to our reliance on oil, gas, and coal? Can we stand up to the considerable power and clout of the fossil fuel industry in order to safeguard the welfare of the ocean on which the lives of humans and marine life depends? 

St. James, Scallops, and Drought

The church today celebrates the Feast of Saint James. It’s perhaps fitting that as we observe the feast day of one of the two brothers that Jesus called “Boanerges” or “Sons of Thunder”, we have a chance for thunderstorms in parts of Nebraska that are sorely in need of rain and cooler temperatures.

The scallop shell is the traditional symbol for St. James. A Google search for “scallop shell, St James”   yields more than one explanation for the association of this shell with St James. There are some fine legends behind these explanations; some involve knights and/or their horses falling into water, being fished out, and then being seen to be covered in mollusks. Whatever the historical reason for the adoption of the scallop shell as the symbol for St. James, one delicious result has been a tradition of eating Coquilles St. Jacques (St. James Scallops) on the day.

We know now that shellfish of all kinds are endangered by ocean acidification. Ocean acidification and global warming are related; both are caused by an excess of carbon in the atmosphere, and both could be mitigated by controlling carbon emissions.  The ocean serves as a carbon sink; this helps make the effects of high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere milder than they would be otherwise, but it also means that the ocean has absorbed a considerable amount of carbon, leading to a less alkaline ocean. (A recent Scientific American blog guest post – The Flames of Ocean Acidification by Matthew Huelsenbeck  -- explains some of the latest findings.) Some call what’s happening in the oceans “the osteoporosis of the sea” because of the effect of this change of chemistry on the shells of all sorts of mollusks.  When scallops and other shellfish lose the protection of their hard shells, they cannot survive.

The shellfish in the sea and the plants, animals, and people suffering from the heat and drought in Nebraska are connected as all living things are connected. It’s no surprise, then, that carbon emissions that harm one also harm another. This summer’s high heat and drought conditions have helped many people finally see the connections among climate change, greenhouse gases, and hardship for living things. As we wake up to what is happening, we might take a cue from the Sons of Thunder and make sure our leaders hear us when we ask for action that would ensure a more stable climate. And maybe, if we make deep changes soon enough, there might still be Coquilles St. Jacques for someone to eat some July 25 in the next century.