[Scott] Coming up on "Energy Switch," we'll look at the environmental health of the world's oceans.

- We have places where the fish are very, very well managed, and I would say the U.S.

is one of those.

- Okay.

- The Pacific groundfish is a success story.

In 2000, that fishery was almost in complete collapse.

But right now, if you look at the fishery, it's in much, much better shape.

- Let's talk about oceans and climate.

- We like to say that the ocean is... It's a stabilizing force.

It has taken up more than 90% of the heat that's been generated from burning of fossil fuels.

- Right.

- I mean, 20 years ago, people were not talking about this.

It was happening, but the techniques weren't there, the accuracy of measuring it.

Like Margaret said, we didn't have the tools to measure that kind of detail, but just about every aspect of life is going to be impacted in one way or another.

[Scott] Up next, part one of our exploration of ocean health.

[Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by Arizona State University.

Shaping global leaders, driving innovation, and transforming the future.

Arizona State, The New American University.

[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

Even if we lived inland, we rely on the ocean for food, for transport, especially of imported goods, for rainfall.

Much of inland weather is influenced by the ocean.

The oceans are so big and so important to the rest of life on Earth, that there's a lot to talk about.

In part one, we'll look at the health of fisheries and other sea life, and how CO2 and warming temperatures affect the oceans, and how both of those interact with us.

My expert guests are Margaret Leinen.

She's the former director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, and a former assistant director of the National Science Foundation.

Rick Spinrad is the former administrator for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the former undersecretary of commerce for oceans.

Coming up, we'll dive into ocean health, part one.

Let's do a little lightning round, just to get us started on these things.

What do we rely on the ocean for?

One thing, right?

- Oh, I would say security.

- Okay.

- Food, especially seafood.

- Food.

Sure.

- Prosperity.

- Prosperity.

- Drugs from the sea.

- Oh, like pharmaceutical things?

- Pharmaceuticals.

- Oh, interesting, that one I thought of.

- Yeah, I was going to say health writ large.

- Transport.

- Oh, sure.

- Shipping.

- You bet.

- We can probably go through every sector, energy.

- Yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

- It takes up heat from the warming climate.

- There is something that stirs the soul about the oceans, that I think at the end of the day, is critical for people's wellbeing.

- Yeah.

What are some of the challenges to the health of the ocean today?

- Warming.

- Warming of the ocean.

- Yeah.

- And the Earth.

- Development, everything that we do to gain energy from the sea, gain food from the sea.

- Okay.

- In terms of sustainability, especially.

- Associated with the warming, sea level rise.

- Okay.

- And coastal erosion.

- Coastal erosion.

- Yes.

Right behind you.

- Yeah.

- Something happening back here.

- Right behind Margaret is pollution.

That's part of it as well.

- Yeah.

Plastics.

- Plastics for one.

- Let's dive in a little bit.

How healthy is the ocean today?

- Well, it depends on what part of it you're in.

Some parts of the ocean are warming much faster than others.

Some of the fisheries are in worse shape than others.

- Yeah.

- We all have seen coastal areas that have a lot of nutrient pollution, where if you look at the middle of the ocean, not a big issue.

- Yeah, yeah.

- We have a colleague who's very focused on what he calls urban seas.

And the extent to which exactly what happens when you've got large mega cities right on the coast.

- Yeah.

- And it's everything from development in areas where perhaps they're not accommodating sea level rise adequately, to outflow from pollutants, to just use of the ocean.

Major ports see extraordinary use of the sea lanes, which is going to contribute to the sea life in that area and also the water quality itself.

- Right, in the energy world, the rich countries are asking basically Asia to burn coal, make our stuff and ship it to us, so we can be green.

Is that going on in fishing as well?

- So in any given year around the world, countries probably catch about a hundred million tons of fish, plus or minus.

- A 100 million tons.

- Tons.

- A couple billion pounds.

- A lot.

Yeah, exactly.

Forty percent of that typically is caught by China, but certainly Indonesia, India, Peru are major fisheries countries.

The United States typically is about sixth in the whole listing.

- Interesting.

- In fact, in the U.S., we probably import between 70 and 80% of the seafood that we consume.

- I think the big evolution has been aquaculture.

And so aquaculture is not... It's roughly half and half, wild-caught seafood and aquaculture around the world.

- Around the world, yeah.

- And aquaculture is farming of the oceans basically.

- Yeah, whether it's growing salmon in pens or whether it's growing seaweed.

- A lot of shrimp.

- And my favorite, oysters.

- That would be considered not free range fish or the equivalent on land.

- And as Margaret said, that's for the globe.

For the U.S., it's considerably smaller.

- Is aquaculture a good thing for ocean health?

Is it mixed?

- It depends on how it's done.

- Okay.

- You know, we've had aquaculture for shellfish for a long time.

And, you know, oysters and mussels clean the water.

So that's a very positive thing.

Situations that aren't so good are where a lot of fish are being grown in nets or pens, and they're putting a ton of food in for the fish that isn't being consumed.

- And in those same pens, there's a real concern about genetic modification of the fish that are being cultured and then escape into the natural-- - Yeah.

- Population.

- So that's like an invasive species.

Is that the natural to that local... Interesting.

- Yeah, exactly.

- And we worry about pathogens, disease in the fish.

- Wow.

- One of the interesting aspects of the pen-based aquaculture for the large fish is the potential for open ocean aquaculture, where you can imagine these large pens are effectively drifting or at least staying in one basic area.

And it's really put a stake in the ground and the need for international agreements on how you do this kind of activity.

- Yeah, yeah.

Interesting.

- I think the potential for the ocean to be productive that way is pretty strong.

- Right.

How do we monitor fish populations?

- Well, the fundamental tool is stock assessments.

Where you basically go out with a slow ship and a net, catch fish, count them, extrapolate based on the area that you've covered.

However, over the last few years, some really extraordinary new technologies have come out.

One is the use of underwater robots, autonomous underwater vehicles with acoustic systems.

- Acoustic systems, sounding-- - Echo sounders, we used to call it.

- Fish populations and different sizes.

- Yeah, it sends a ping of different frequencies and can tell about the volume of fish, just like a fish finder works in a fishing boat.

But that's where concepts like environmental DNA, eDNA are really starting to pay off.

And in short, that's a technology that allows you to sample the water and determine what was in that water and sometimes even how many of them.

- I'm envisioning a census of fishes basically.

Do we have that, or-- - We did.

And the consequence of that was something like 1,200 new species were defined.

- Yeah.

- Thousands of scientists, hundreds of cruises were conducted.

- Right.

- And it established what is now an ocean biogeographic information system.

- Yeah.

- Although some would argue that there's still close to a million species that are undefined.

- How are the populations doing today?

I mean, does that vary globally?

- Definitely.

We have places where the fish are very, very well managed.

And I would say the U.S.

is one of those.

I mean, it's not perfect, but our fisheries management councils are considered to be exemplars of how to do it.

- Gotcha.

- In the United States, the National Marine Fishery Services monitors about 360 species for overfishing.

And that's the key word.

- Okay.

- And right now, based on the last report, about 80% of those fisheries are not overfished.

- Oh, it's-- - And in fact, 50 of those roughly 360, have come back from being overfished.

But we still have about 50 that are overfished.

- People tend not to realize how important the big fish are.

Certainly big things like tuna, marlin, et cetera, in stabilizing the ecosystem.

So if you compare that to, you know, what would happen if all the predators for mice went away?

We'd be overrun by mice.

Well, in the ocean, if all the big predators for the tiny little fishes went away, then all of a sudden you have an ecosystem that's not balanced.

- I would add, in addition to the impacts on the ecosystem, there are geopolitical impacts.

And it's not unheard of in human history for wars to break out over the availability or lack thereof of certain fisheries.

- I had never thought of it like that, that's fascinating.

Where is sort of the least sustainable fishing going on today?

And then what's the process to try to get that improved?

- I would argue as a class, the IUU, illegal, unreported, unregulated fishing.

- Okay.

- Is where that problem is largest, and it's not isolated to a particular nation.

- Right.

- A lot of it happens in the West Pacific.

- Okay.

- And it's contributing probably 10 to 15% of our fish that we get here in the United States.

- But it's not just that it's unsustainable, but the practices.

- Yeah.

- So they may have smaller ships that are catching the fish, then bring it to the factory ship to aggregate it.

You know, it may be one country's factory ship, but they're fishing in somebody else's-- - Right.

- Exclusive economic zone, that doesn't have the resources to protect.

- But it's also a question of safety.

- Yeah.

- So unlike the beef that you buy, which goes through a rather rigorous process, some would argue that the process for ensuring the safety of the seafood is not as rigorous.

In part, because it's hard to trace where that seafood's coming from.

- Interesting.

- Yeah, the bag may say that it's a product of Peru, but was it caught in Peruvian waters?

- Right.

- Or was it caught somewhere else and simply made into the fish filet?

- Processed in Peru.

- Or even transferred at sea to a ship that's going back to Peru.

- To Peru, yeah.

You know, one of the keys is making it not profitable.

And that means making people aware of it and making governments willing to say, "We're not going to take..." - Yeah.

- "You can't come into our port and sell that fish because it's illegal."

- Hey, how do we start to restore the fish stocks?

The things that have been depleted?

What's are some things that can be done there?

- The Pacific groundfish is a success story, I think.

In 2000, that fishery was almost in complete collapse.

There were whole communities on the coast of Northern California and Oregon and Washington that were decimated economically.

And the Fisheries Management Council saw that they needed a mixture of approaches.

And so they turned to the fishing community and said, "All right, we want to protect certain areas.

Consider them nurseries for these groundfish.

Where should we do it?"

So instead of dictating that this area will be a no fishing zone, actually work with the fishing community and identify those.

Vessel buybacks, bycatch avoidance, these individual fishing quotas.

But right now, if you look at the Pacific groundfish fishery, it's in much, much better shape.

- How do the oceans, in a big picture, interact with Earth's climate?

- The biggest thing about oceans is they exchange heat and water vapor and CO2 with the atmosphere.

And each one of those is involved with climate.

So in exchange of heat, it's mostly the oceans taking up heat.

So the entire ocean, all the way to the bottom, is warming.

And it has taken up more than 90% of the heat that's been generated from burning of fossil fuels and CO2 in the atmosphere.

More than 90%.

So we like to say that the ocean is... It's a stabilizing force on climate.

If we think of the ocean not doing that, we would be in a lot of trouble.

The second thing is water vapor.

A warmer atmosphere can accommodate higher concentrations of water vapor.

And so what's happening is that the ocean through the water vapor is changing the precipitation patterns.

It's about the same amount, but it's in bigger storms.

And then there's CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

Roughly 30% is being taken up by the ocean.

And so that's changing the ocean.

It's causing it to become more acidic.

- Right.

- Not an acid, but less basic.

- Yeah.

- If I can put it, we monitor the ocean heat content.

We have for years.

Last year was the ninth year in a row that it continued to increase.

And the amount of heat that goes into the ocean is equivalent to the energy of 12 Hiroshima atomic bombs every second.

That's how much heat is going in, just-- - New heat, you mean?

Or totally?

- That's the total heat that's going in.

- Okay, okay.

- The additional heat-- - Right.

- That we saw last year is measured in zettajoules.

So a zetta is one followed by 21 zeros.

- Right.

- And that 23 zettajoules of additional heat is 200 times the electrical energy usage of the globe.

So that just gives you a sense of just how much heat is going into the system.

- How much has it warmed in just temperature terms that our listeners might understand besides zettajoules?

- Yeah, it's about, on average, about a degree and a half or so around the globe.

- Of C?

- It's centigrade.

Centigrade, yeah.

- That's about the same as the atmos... Or the air then, about a degree and a half.

- Yeah, similar, but it takes a lot more heat to raise the temperature of water one degree.

- Okay.

- Than it does the temperature of air.

- Ninety percent take up.

- And I mean, this is actually a pretty simple issue.

We're putting more energy into the system.

It's got to go somewhere.

So you do see severe typhoons, you do see severe hurricanes, you see impacts on energy.

You've got a picture of a wind farm here in the studio.

Is the wind going to be where we say it's going to be in a few years?

The patterns are going to change because the dynamics of the atmosphere are changing, because the ocean thermal structure changes.

So just about every aspect of life is going to be impacted in one way or another.

- And you said acidification.

So the pH is changing, numbers on that?

Do we know?

- It's better to think about it in terms of, you know, 30 to 50% more acidic.

So far, it's primarily been a problem in the surface ocean.

And so it's affected coral reefs, which are shallower, and makes it more difficult for coral reefs to build the skeleton.

But the warming causes, not the coral organism, but its symbiont to leave the cell.

And those little microorganisms are the things that have the color.

They're what make the corals the beautiful colors.

So that's why when they warm and these organisms leave, they say they're bleached.

It's not just the organism itself, but larvae are very susceptible.

The larvae in places where we grow oysters and mussels and other shellfish, a big acidification of that will not just affect the oyster that's growing, but it affects the ability for the oyster to reproduce.

- Yeah.

Interesting.

- And in fact, that industry was the canary in the coal mine for ocean acidification in the U.S.

They thought it was a virus.

They thought it was a temperature effect.

And they finally recognized it was pH related.

And it almost ruined a hundred million dollar oyster industry on the west coast of the U.S.

- Is that all human forced, or is it a proportion or are things trending that way?

Some already?

What's the thinking there?

- Most of what we're seeing is a consequence of the introduction of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere-- - Yeah, okay.

- And then their absorption into the ocean.

- The areas that are warming the fastest are the poles.

- Okay.

- And so that's why everybody is so focused on melting of glaciers on land like Greenland, and other polar areas and then the ice sheets.

- Right, and is that having an impact then on sea life?

What's the-- - One of the biggest things we see is the movement of ecosystems toward the poles.

So things that can move, like fish, are moving north in the northern hemisphere, south in the southern hemisphere.

You don't have a big lobster fishery in Long Island Sound anymore.

- And the same with the pollock in Alaska.

- Right.

- The Alaskan pollock are becoming Russian pollock.

- Yeah.

- Having to learn whole new languages, I guess.

- Do svidaniya to the U.S.

and heading over.

- And lionfish, we never had them off the East Coast of the United States and they're, similarly, moving further north.

- Yeah.

- To the point where they're highly invasive in some areas.

- Huh.

- Also important are the movement of pathogens and parasites.

So the pathogen that causes cholera, vibrio, doesn't like cold water.

But over the last decade, we've started to see vibrio move into California waters.

And we haven't had a lot of cholera, but it just wasn't something that you found in California waters before.

And then pathogens of marine organisms.

- Yeah.

- So about three years ago, we started having this huge starfish mortality.

And it was starfish wasting disease.

- Interesting.

- And it's a pathogen.

And it decimated starfish on the West Coast.

- Well, what's the good news?

[laughs] I mean, as we think about these things, change isn't always bad.

- Britain is starting to grow wine grapes.

[group laughs] - I'm reminded of a talk I gave in Russia, in fact, about 10 years ago, hand wringing about the impacts.

And it was not getting a lot of resonance among the Russians, and they said, "We're going to have vineyards in Siberia.

What's the problem?"

And there is a grain of truth to that, that we can start accommodating these changes.

And I think the good news is that 20 years ago, the error bars associated with the predictions and the projections were quite large, for a whole bunch of reasons.

We didn't have a lot of observations.

The models were not as good.

We didn't have as many models.

Now, good modelers want as many different models as they can find, because they build ensembles.

And they look at how the various models behave under different conditions.

- Interesting.

- And so we're getting really good at making these predictions and projections.

Sea level rise is one example, where it was kind of a shot in the dark.

I remember the days when places like San Francisco were taking a worst case scenario with regard to sea level rise and what they should do with the transit system there.

Now they're getting much better information.

So civil engineers, local planners are... They have better tools than they ever had before, to deal with the changes that they are going to see.

- And you know, infrastructure is 40 year turnaround.

So, you know, if we can say now what the situation for sea level rise is going to be in 30 to 40 years, communities can plan.

- Yeah.

- And looking around at all of the images around us, we're doing basic and applied research on a lot of different kinds of energy.

I don't know who originated it, but lots of people say it's not a silver bullet, it's silver buckshot.

That, you know, we have to... All of the above.

- Portfolios matter, don't they?

I mean- - They do.

- They're secure.

- Yeah, and the fact that we have some more options now, because you think of something like offshore wind.

That was just a concept.

That was a PowerPoint idea 20, 30 years ago.

- It's interesting you bring that up.

There's a tremendous amount of ocean bottom surveying.

- Sure, yeah.

- And then permanent anchors and these are massive structures out there, et cetera.

Does that impact oceans?

We're talking about oceans.

- Yeah, it's a great question.

The good news is that there are structures in place to ensure that before you put that wind vane and that turbine in the ocean, that we're going to do all the assessments as well as we can.

- Right.

- That doesn't mean that 20, 30 years from now, we might find out there is some long-term impact on benthic communities.

But I do think we're adaptable enough that if we see that's the case, we can find solutions.

- I think the other thing is, none of these things are zero impact.

- Yeah.

- The issue is, not just the trade-off of how offshore wind influences the environment, but what is the alternative if we don't- - Right.

- Have this new mix of energy.

- And what's our tolerance?

What's our risk tolerance?

- What's our risk tolerance?

- So the risk being the probability and the consequence.

In some cases, the probability is non-zero, but the consequence might be acceptable.

- Yeah.

- So that's what we have to weigh when we do all of these things, right?

- Yeah.

- Look, we've done a really cool, nice discussion on fisheries and on climate and oceans, and that kind of thing.

Let's take a little break, and when we come back, we're going to dive into some of the pollution related challenges to oceans and the environment.

The ocean provides us 200 billion pounds of seafood a year.

Globally, half comes from aquaculture.

China leads in fishing with 40% of the world's catch.

The U.S.

ranks sixth.

We manage our fisheries here quite well.

Eighty percent are not overfished, but they're less healthy internationally, and about 20% of global seafood is illegally fished.

This happens mostly in Asia, but makes up 10 to 15% of what we import.

Besides fish, we talked about climate.

The oceans have absorbed 90% of the warming caused by elevated CO2 in the atmosphere, causing cold water species to move toward the poles, and could change weather patterns for us land dwellers.

Oceans also absorb one quarter of anthropogenic CO2, which lowers the pH of the water, and makes it harder for corals to form, and shellfish to make shells.

The good news is that we have better tools to measure, track, and adapt to changes in ocean health.

More on that in part two.

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Home to the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, addressing critical challenges toward a future in which all living things thrive.

Arizona State, The New American University.