We want to believe that we can continue doing what we've done for the past thousand years and not worry about the consequences coming back to us.

We want to believe that we can continue doing what we've done for the past thousand years and not worry about the consequences coming back to us.

Ocean acidification - the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is turning the oceans increasingly acid - is a slow but accelerating impact with consequences that will greatly overshadow all the oil spills put together. The warming trend that is CO2-related will overshadow all the oil spills that have ever occurred put together.

Give the ocean a break. Give yourself a break.

If Darwin could see what we now see, what we now know about the ocean, about the atmosphere, about the nature of life, as we now understand it, about the importance of microbes - I think he would just beam with joy that many of the thoughts and the glimpses of the majesty of life on Earth that he had during his life, now magnified many times over.

Far and away, the greatest threat to the ocean, and thus to ourselves, is ignorance. But we can do something about that.

I am driven by what I know; that the world I love is in trouble.