The problem is found throughout the marine food chain from the base, plankton (showing early signs of reproductive and maturation complications) to the largest fish species in the water, the whale shark (on the endangered species list.)

The ocean is not functioning properly. It’s a festering problem that will not go away. It’s called acidification, and, as long as fossil fuels predominate, it will methodically, and assuredly, over time, kill the ocean.

Scientists already have evidence of trouble in the seawater.

The use of fossil fuel, in large measure, is the primary pathway behind this impending extinction event. Excessive quantities of CO₂, of which the ocean absorbs 30% of CO₂ emitted into the atmosphere, are changing the ocean’s chemistry, called acidification, which eventually has the potential to kill most, but not all, ocean life forms.

This problem is unquestionably serious, and here’s why: The rate of change of ocean pH (measure of acidity) is 10 times faster than 55 million years ago. That period of geologic history was directly linked to a mass extinction event as levels of CO₂ mysteriously went off the charts.

Ten times larger is big, very big, when a measurement of 0.1 in change of pH is consistent with significant change!

According to C.L.Dybas, On a Collision Course: Oceans Plankton and Climate Change, BioScience, 2006: “This acidification is occurring at a rate [10-to-100] times faster [depending upon the area] than ever recorded.”

In other words, as far as science is concerned, the rate of change of pH in the ocean is “off the charts.” Therefore, and as a result, nobody knows how this will play out because there is no known example in geologic history of such a rapid change in pH. This begs the biggest question of modern times, which is: Will ocean acidification cause an extinction event this century, within current lifetimes?

The Extinction Event Already Appears to be Underway

According to the State of the Ocean Report, d/d October 3, 2013,International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO): “This [acidification] of the ocean is unprecedented in the Earth’s known history. We are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change… The next mass extinction may have already begun.”

According to Jane Lubchenco, PhD, who is the former director (2009-13) of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the effects of acidification are already present in some oyster fisheries, like the West Coast of the U.S.  According to Lubchenco: “You can actually see this happening… It’s not something a long way into the future. It is a very big problem,” Fiona Harvey, Ocean Acidification due to Carbon Emissions is at Highest for 300M Years, The Guardian October 2, 2013.

And, according to Richard Feely, PhD, (Dep. Of Oceanography, University of Washington) and Christopher Sabine, PhD, (Senior Fellow, University of Washington, Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean): “If the current carbon dioxide emission trends continue… the ocean will continue to undergo acidification, to an extent and at rates that have not occurred for tens of millions of years… nearly all marine life forms that build calcium carbonate shells and skeletons studied by scientists thus far have shown deterioration due to increasing carbon dioxide levels in seawater,” Dr. Richard Feely and Dr. Christopher Sabine, Oceanographers, Carbon Dioxide and Our Ocean Legacy, Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, April 2006.

And, according to Alex Rogers, PhD, Scientific Director of the International Programme on the State of the Ocean, OneWorld (UK) Video, Aug.  2011: “I think if we continue on the current trajectory, we are looking at a mass extinction of marine species even if only coral reef systems go down, which it looks like they will certainly by the end of the century.”

“Today’s human-induced acidification is a unique event in the geological history of our planet due to its rapid rate of change. An analysis of ocean acidification over the last 300 million years highlights the unprecedented rate of change of the current acidification. The most comparable event 55 million years ago was linked to mass extinctions… At that time, though the rate of change of ocean pH was rapid, it may have been 10 times slower than current change,” IGBP, IOC, SCOR [2013], Ocean Acidification Summary for Policymakers – Third Symposium on the Ocean in a High- CO₂ World, International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, Stockholm, Sweden, 2013.

Fifty-five million years ago, during a dark period of time known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), huge quantities of CO₂were somehow released into the atmosphere, nobody knows from where or how, but temperatures around the world soared by 10 degrees F, and the ocean depths became so corrosive that sea shells simply dissolved rather than pile up on the ocean floor.

“Most, if not all, of the five global mass extinctions in Earth’s history carry the fingerprints of the main symptoms of… global warming, ocean acidification and anoxia or lack of oxygen. It is these three factors — the ‘deadly trio’ — which are present in the ocean today. In fact, (the situation) is unprecedented in the Earth’s history because of the high rate and speed of change,” Rogers, A.D., Laffoley, D. d’A. 2011.International Earth System Expert Workshop on Ocean Stresses and Impacts, Summary Report, IPSO Oxford, 2011.

Zooming in on the Future, circa 2050 – Location: Castello Aragonese

Scientists have discovered a real life Petri dish of seawater conditions similar to what will occur by the year 2050, assuming humans continue to emit CO₂ at current rates.

This real life Petri dish is located in the Tyrrhenian Sea at Castello Aragonese, which is a tiny island that rises straight up out of the sea like a tower. The island is located 17 miles west of Naples. Tourists like to visit Aragonese Castle (est. 474 BC) on the island to see the display of medieval torture devices.

But, the real action is offshore, under the water, where Castello Aragonese holds a very special secret, which is an underwater display that gives scientists a window 50 years into the future. Here’s the scoop: A quirk of geology is at work whereby volcanic vents on the seafloor surrounding the island are emitting (bubbling) large quantities of CO₂. In turn, this replicates the level of CO₂ scientists expect the ocean to absorb over the course of the next 50 years.

“When you get to the extremely high CO₂ almost nothing can tolerate that,” according to Jason-Hall Spencer, PhD, professor of marine biology, School of Marine Science and Engineering, Plymouth University (UK), who studies the seawater around Castello Aragonese (Elizabeth Kolbert, The Acid Sea, National Geographic, April, 2011.)

The adverse effects of excessive CO₂ are found everywhere in the immediate surroundings of the tiny island. For example, barnacles, which are one of the toughest of all sea life, are missing around the base of the island where seawater measurements show the heaviest concentration of CO₂. And, within the water, limpets, which wander into the area seeking food, show severe shell dissolution. As a result, their shells are almost completely transparent. Also, the underwater sea grass is a vivid green, which is abnormal because tiny organisms usually coat the blades of sea grass and dull the color, but no such organisms exists. Additionally, sea urchins, which are commonplace further away from the vents, are nowhere to be seen around the island.

The only life forms found around Castello Aragonese are jellyfish, sea grass, and algae; whereas, an abundance of underwater sea life is found in the more distant surrounding waters. Thus, the Castello Aragonese Petri dish is essentially a dead sea except for weeds.

This explains why Jane Lubchenco, former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, refers to ocean acidification as global warming’s “equally evil twin,” Ibid.

To that end, a slow motion death march is consuming life in the ocean in real time, and we humans are witnesses to this extinction event.

What to do?

The logic is quite simple. If fossil fuels cause extinction events, stop using fossil fuels.

Postscript: Alex Rogers, Scientific Director of IPSO and professor of Conservation Biology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford (Fellow of Somerville College): “Climate Change affects are going to be extremely serious, and it’s interesting when you think many people who talk about this in terms of what will happen in the future… our children will see the effects of this. Well, actually we’re seeing very severe impacts from climate change already… We’re already there.” (Source: State of the Ocean.org, Video Interview, Dr. Alex Rogers)

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at roberthunziker@icloud.com.

As a life member of the Folk Alliance International and until recently a member of its board, I’d like to be able to congratulate the organization on its move from Memphis to a much better situation in Kansas City.

But the first annual FAI Conference in KC will feature Al Gore in a special presentation, for conference attendees only, of his quasi-prophetic fantasy, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change. It makes me feel like FAI is dancing on Pete Seeger’s grave. Does it really matter much whether they’re doing it out of ignorance or making a deliberate effort to steer folk music far to the right of where its political and social allegiances have traditionally belonged?

Am I over-reacting, refusing to come to grips with contemporary political reality and with Al Gore, the wronged should-have-been President, moral beacon, intellectual paragon, and his role as a leader of the ecological movement?

Gore’s approach to solving the world’s problems centers on venture capital firms, such as his own Generation Investment Manager and the firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, in  which he is a partner. Exactly how he rationalizes such projects of these firms as AOL, Amazon, Electronic Arts and Google as good for the environment and harbingers of a better future isn’t all that interesting. It’s just the usual neoliberal blather, the liberal version of the conservative lie that a rising tide lifts all boats. Neither ever asks whether everybody has a boat, or whether the boats we do have will carry all the people now living, let alone coming generations, or how there can be life-sustaining air, water, soil and minerals if the depredations of high-tech capitalism, which are at least as devastating as those of earlier versions, are allowed to continue.

Folk music is supposed to side with the people whose lives are ruined, from West Virginia to Japan, not the exploiters who mask and attempt to explain away the all-but-irreversible damage that has already been done in the name of “growth.” The question that no Gore speech or PowerPoint  has ever answered is “Sustainable for whom?”

It’s a question to which previous generations of folk musicians and activists associated with it have never failed to demand answers.

Gore’s six drivers include nothing remotely related to the kind of human-scale empowerment projects (for instance, the civil rights and anti-war movements, Operation Wall Street, and labor rights) that folk music has traditionally been involved with.

From this point of view, Al Gore is the anti-Pete Seeger: Deceitful where Pete was honest, cowardly where Pete was brave, an apologist for continuing to destroy the environment where Seeger was an ecological champion, a censor where Pete stood on the rock of the First Amendment even when Congress and his own lawyers told him it was a loser. (Pete won his case.)

Above all, Pete Seeger was a champion of music, all kinds of music, in America and the world, whereas Al Gore spent much of the ‘80s berating and belittling popular music, even helping convene a Senate hearing on the “threat” of  lyrics to the nation’s children. Ten years later, in typical fashion, he denied he’d even attended most of the conference, although he was the only Senator who was present for all of that travesty (take a look at www.youtube.com/watch?v=d65BxvSNa2o if you must, but I was there and my own eyes swear to it).  He and his wife Tipper wanted to raise my kids while at least one of theirs turned out to be a drunk (or was that a druggie?) with a penchant for driving while intoxicated. (Is this unfair to Al Gore’s kids? Much less unfair than the Gores were to the kids—current and former–who loved and found emotional refuge in heavy metal and hip-hop. )  Finally, the moral exemplars’ marriage dissolved as Al was found creeping out of a massage brothel in the middle of the Oregon night.

One wonders if Al Gore ever met Pete Seeger. It’s hard to imagine where it might have been.

It couldn’t have been at a peace rally—as Congressman, Senator and Vice President, Gore voted yes on every war question from Grenada to Iraq to Yugoslavia. He pretended to agonize over whether to support the first Bush invasion of Iraq but, it turns out, this was simply because he was guaranteed to get network TV time with his speech.

It couldn’t have been at a rally for women’s rights. Gore never supported abortion rights more than halfheartedly, and while in the House, played a meaningful role in ending Federal financing of abortion—which had the effect of denying any practical right for the poorest American women to exercise their freedom to choose.

It couldn’t have been at a rally for the environment, because Al Gore’s so-called “environmentalism” ends just about where the deep commitment of Pete Seeger began. Gore is the kind of ecological advocate who damns, say, timber mining in Brazil while either supporting or never uttering a peep about coal companies strip mining the Appalachians. Gore grandstands as Barack Obama’s moral scourge on the Keystone pipeline, but he treads much more carefully around actual energy executives. His inherited wealth stems from favors done for his father, Senator Albert Gore Sr., by Armand Hammer, the owner of Occidental Petroleum. Al Gore’s environmental forte is failed adventures in public relations, such as his mild support for the Kyoto Climate Accords, a cost-free move since there was never any realistic chance of ratification by the U.S. Senate.

It’s not possible that it would have been at a labor rally. Gore blabbers about “growth” and “jobs” just like every other neoliberal bullshit artist. He also was a prime champion of NAFTA, which has been devastating to workers rights and livelihoods in both the United States and Mexico. (He “won the debate” against Ross Perot during the ’92 election, but Perot, reactionary as he is, was right to sneer at the baloney Gore was spouting.) In the 2000 election Gore claimed he agreed with unions “90% but not on free trade.” This is about like the claim that humans share 98% of their DNA with chimpanzees.

God knows, Al Gore wouldn’t have met Pete Seeger at an Occupy Wall Street event. Gore’s politics have never been remotely inclusive—he is another neoliberal devising programs “for the poor” without consulting anyone who is actually poor. (The first Senator Gore used to boast about his country roots and being sent to a one-room schoolhouse. He never did mention that the vast majority of the children around him—white as well as black—had no schools to attend at all. They were already too busy working for a living as sharecroppers and miners.)

Gore and Seeger definitely would not have bumped into one another at one of the annual rallies held at Fort Benning, Georgia to protest the continued existence of that dictator/torturer training camp, The School of the Americas. Pete never missed one. Gore was never there because he backs U.S. foreign policy, which essentially attempts to treat the nations of South and Central America as a string of colonial outposts led by children who must be instructed by the self-proclaimed grown-ups in Washington.

And for God’s sake, it wouldn’t have been at any kind of music conference because, for two decades, Al Gore has been scorned as wanna-be censor and father of the PMRC. He was the eager assistant for his now ex-wife Tipper in her falsehood and fantasy ridden campaign against rap, heavy metal and rock that didn’t abide by the Gore family’s supposed Baptist principles.

Pete Seeger was one of the half dozen greatest figures in American folk culture.

Al Gore was a Congressman and Senator who opposed gun control and declared that homosexuality was not another “normal optional life style.” (It also might be said that while Pete Seeger was a remarkably coherent, focused and cogent writer and speaker, Al Gore has the verbal felicity of a wooden carving.)

This is the man behind the “frank and clear-eyed assessment” of the present  that Folk Alliance International will present as an exemplar of  “The Future.”  It’s hard to know what Gore’s going to talk about, but it’s most likely to be an extension of his self-promoting film, An Inconvenient Truth.

There is also the significant question of whether Gore is being paid to do his “presentation.” In early February, Gore was paid 100,000 English pounds (more than $160,000) for a speech to the Forbes Forum. In the history of the Folk Alliance, singers and musicians making appearances have never been paid. In most cases, they must pay for their own travel and lodging.  It is hard to believe that Gore’s PR machine would not be braying loudly if he were giving away his precious time and PowerPoint to struggling folk singers and banjo players. It’s even harder to believe that the FAI, whose board isn’t even interested enough to have a fundraising committee, is spending the big bucks. It will be a wonder to see how the FAI membership reacts if Gore’s fee is revealed…or if FAI refuses to reveal it, for that matter.

Is it absolutely morally “wrong” for the FAI to invite Al Gore despite all that he has done and represents? Of course not. Is it entirely reasonable to draw the conclusions drawn here about what that tells us about FAI? Of course it is. It would be one thing, for instance, to invite Gore to speak on a Conference panel with divergent views about the future. (That might even be refreshing, since so much folk discussion centers on the past.) But what the FAI has actually done is given a green Bernie Madoff a platform for his sales pitch.

Coda: One might wonder what Pete Seeger would think of a right of center (the center being the American people, not the denizens of the Beltway) politician at a folk music festival. I don’t know. But I do know this:

In October 2000 with the Presidential election between Al Gore and Shrub Bush running neck and neck and a third candidate, Ralph Nader, running on the Green ticket while receiving substantial support and also receiving vicious jibes and threats from loyalist Gore supporters, I attended a dinner party of about a dozen at Harold and Natalie Leventhal’s Riverside Drive apartment. Early in the evening, we were each asked to state our preference in the upcoming presidential campaign. It got to Pete about halfway through. He talked about how he had been doing this a long time, and about his thoughts on splinter political parties.  To him three choices was not enough. He said, if I remember the number right, that what was really needed was about eighteen different parties: A party for the vegans and a party for the pacifists and a party for….I don’t know, he might even have said a party for the fascists. (I don’t think so.) What he meant was, I know myself well enough that nobody can bully me.

And then he said: I’m voting for Ralph Nader.

Dave Marsh edits Rock & Rap Confidential, one of CounterPunch’s favorite newsletters, now available for free by emailing: rockrap@aol.com. Dave blogs at http://davemarsh.us/

This article will appear in the upcoming issue of Rock & Rap Confidential. You can subscribe for free to the email version of RRC by writing to rockrap@aol.com.

Every year brings the world more climatological science that man-made climate change, or overall global warming, is chronically worsening.

Every year, from Antarctica to Greenland, from the Andes to Alaska, the ice is melting, the permafrost is melting, and very soon the Arctic may have a re-unprecedented ice-free season. Every year, more and more businesses are speaking out on how climate change is damaging their businesses. Insurance companies were in the lead on sounding the alarm on global warming. Just a few days ago, Coca-Cola’s vice president for environment and water resources, Jeffrey Seabright, told the New York Times that “increased droughts, more unpredictable variability, 100-year floods every two years” were affecting the supply of sugar cane and sugar beets, “as well as citrus for [Coca-Cola’s] fruit juices.”

Every year, companies quit the climate-denying U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and instead attend conferences on the threat of climate change at places like the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland for big businesses and politicians.

Every year, more mainstream and conservative economists and companies declare their support for a carbon tax.

In Washington, Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, has put climate change on center stage for becoming what he said is a chief contributor to rising global poverty rates.

Every year, there are more demonstrations and marches of people and students around the world demanding action, conversion to renewable energies, and conservation efficiencies. University students are increasingly demanding their schools’ divestment of stock from fossil fuel companies.

Every year, its seems records are being set for sea level rises, more furious storm surges, heat waves, floods, typhoons, and droughts.

Yet every year one institution allows no change in its political climate; nothing is warming up our Congress of 535 legislators who are split between believers and disbelievers on the climate change crises. The result is worse than gridlock; it has become somnolence.

While people may become more frugal in their energy consumption and while businesses may use more renewable energy, a comprehensive national energy conversion mission, reflecting the urgency of action, has to go through Congress.

Omnicidal as it is, climate change has been taken off the table on Capitol Hill. Yes, there are some bills languishing in the hopper, some statements in the Congressional Record, but overall for different Democratic and Republican reasons, Congress has gone AWOL since the energy bill was blocked in the Senate seven years ago.

The Republicans are aggressive climate-change deniers. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) calls global warming a massive hoax and is willing to debate any Democrat. While, by and large, most Democrats are concerned but unwilling to make it a campaign or electoral issue. They’re even unwilling to take on Mr. Inhofe. Somehow, they’ve myopically convinced themselves – even those with grandchildren – that the fast-looming peril provides no net electoral or campaign cash advantages.

This shocking Congressional bubble has avoided the intense focus of the environmental lobby. Astonishingly, there are fewer than a half dozen scattered lobbyists in Washington, D.C. working in personam, full time directly on Congress and its role regarding climate change.

To open up this critical Khyber Pass, called Congress, blocking action on climate change we need, as a minimum, a new 100-person lobbying organization with laser beam, daily focus on every member of the Senate and the House of Representatives. This group would have the requisite scientific, legal, organizing, public relations, and political experience. Every day, the 535 members of our national legislature would feel the light, the heat, and the might of what these hundred advocates unleash directly and indirectly.

The Pentagon’s study a decade ago would be brought to bear with its dire message that climate change is a national security priority. The federal government’s procurement budget would be steered toward renewable fuel and efficiencies specifications for the energy it purchases. The protest activity at the grassroots, which now bursts mostly into the ether, would be sharply redirected to each member of Congress.

The Congressional hearings would garner regular, intensive and productive national attention. The electoral campaigns of both parties would not be allowed to sideline this giant backlash from nature so abused by humankind.

Where would the $25 million annual budget come from for such a lobbying group working to prevent trillions of dollars and millions of lives from being lost? The question is almost absurd were it not for the bizarre aversion to this focus by well-heeled and leading advocates of addressing climate change.

Megabillionaire Michael Bloomberg, just named the United Nations special envoy for climate change and cities, already funding efforts to reduce coal usage, could write the check out of his hip pocket. Billionaire Tom Steyer, a big time opponent to the XL pipeline from Canada and a proven environmentalist from California, could also handily write the check.

Very wealthy Henry M. Paulson Jr., former head of Goldman Sachs and U.S. Treasury Secretary, who is working with Bloomberg and Steyer to commission an economic study on the financial risks connected to climate change, region by region across the U.S. economy, could also write the check.

And don’t forget Al Gore, the leading global publicist of what climatologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University called a “clear and present danger to civilization.” Former Senator Gore – who received the Nobel Prize in 2007 for highlighting the perils of global warming and climate change – could also fund and lead such a group.

Why, readers may ask, am I suggesting a sum small enough that one person could foot the bill for such a portentous peril? Because small sums are better at shaming all those well-endowed institutions and individuals, who know better, but inexplicably have not transformed their concerns into really powerful, serious pursuits for the human race and its more vulnerable posterity.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.