A few days ago my local librarian handed me an interesting book called “The Blue Machine – How the Ocean Works” by Helen Czerski. (My librarian knows I am interested in many of those “other” books that often sit for years unread.) Czerski wrote an amazing book, full of interesting and critically important information about the oceans of the world – and did it in a way that is easily accessible and fun to read. At over 400 pages it isn’t a “short” book, and being a serious book about science isn’t necessarily simple to read and comprehend, but the author is nice enough to throw in fascinating, and often humorous, bits of detail that goes a long way toward avoiding the “snooze factor.”

The book is organized to bring the necessary information to the reader as it is needed to build up the entire story promised by the title. The book is broken into three major parts, “What is the Blue Machine?”, “Traveling the Blue Machine,” and “The Blue Machine and Us”. She presents a detailed description of an amazing “machine” – the oceans of the world. After a fascinating discussion of these important aspcects of the ocean, she finally brings the whole back around to the question of what does that all mean to us, and what might the future be like should we continue treating it as we have in the past (and present), or hopefully when we wake up and take actions to protect OUR future. The book has a very definite “environmental” agenda aimed at “saving the oceans” – but not in a demanding or angry way, Czerski merely describes what is there, how it is changing, and what is likely to happen should we continue treating it as a dumping ground for our wastes and an infinite resource for what we would like to take from it. Great book!

For me, there were some really eye opening discussions about things that should be obvious, but that I had not paid attention to. I found one paragraph particularly enlightening, and rather sobering at the same time. I normally don’t add long quotes to my blogs, but in this case I think the message is important enough to make an exception. This comes from a section discussing how “global warming” is impacting the oceans, and therefore the Earth.

“Tracking the total amount of heat in the ocean is one way to create a planetary thermometer, and it’s showing a steady rise.

But this extra heat isn’t just sitting in storage, parked on a shelf in the back of the ocean equivalent of a cupboard. The extra energy enters the ocean at the top as heat, so the surface waters – the warm mixed layer – are heating up faster than the layers further down. We have seen that a critical feature of the ocean is the set of systems that bring nutrients up from the cold depths towards the sunlight, so that phytoplankton can turn them into the materials of life. But a warmer surface layer makes it much harder for deep nutrients held in cold water to be mixed upwards into the sunlight, because the layering is stronger and harder to overcome. This reduces the raw material for life up in the sunlight, so the whole ecosystem is put under stress. Stronger stratification means that there’s less exchange within the ocean engine for everything: heat, gases, nutrients and more, starving the ocean’s internal interactions for material. The addition of extra heat at the surface is reinforcing the layered structure and therefore acting as a brake on the vertical turning over of the blue machine. A warmer ocean can also feed more energy into the atmosphere, changing weather patterns and making storms more intense. The impact can be particularly sever in the tropic, whee hurricanes and typhoons often hit poor communities that lack resilient infrastructure.”

This is yet one more description of why the problems with global warming aren’t just things getting hotter, it is that the mechanisms keeping the earth’s balances stable are getting undermined. It appears that many parts of “the system” are balanced a bit like a pencil standing on its point, rather than a pendulum hanging from a string. The pendulum is in dynamic equilibrium, push it to one side and it automatically returns to the center. A pencil standing on it point is a very different situation. Push it to one side and it falls. It seems like there might be some really important aspects of the ecosystem that behave more like the pencil and less like a pendulum. We should be VERY careful with how we change things.