Revolusi Biru

Laut merupakan sumber daya alam yang cukup besar. Dalam kehidupan sehari-hari manusia membutuhkan protein yang tidak hanya didapat dari hewan darat tetapi juga hewan laut.

Untuk meningkatkan sumber daya alam di lautan, maka dilaksanakan revolusi biru. Jadi dengan kata lain revolusi biru ialah pengembangan teknologi pemanfaatan sumber daya hayati laut, guna memenuhi kebutuhan pangan manusia.

Sumber daya alam dari laut dapat dibedakan menjadi dua macam yaitu sumber daya alam hayati dan non hayati. Sumber daya alam hayati adalah sumber daya yang berasal dari mahluk hidup, misalnya:

1.       Jenis tumbuhan meliputi alga (rumput laut) yang dapat diolah menjadi agar-agar dan sumber karbohidrat.

2.       Jenis hewani, misalnya ikan, kerang, mutiara, dan bangsa udang-udangan yang menyimpan protein tinggi. Banyak jenis ikan yang dimanfaatkan sebagaipemenuh kontumsi manusia. Khusus kerang mutiara merupakan sumber daya laut yang sangat potensial

Sumber non hayati, yang terdiri dari

1.       Air laut yang banyak mengandung Mg dan NaCl.

2.       Nodul di dasar laut yang berupa endapan Mn, Ni, Co, Cu, Au, dan Zn yang sangat dibutuhkan bagi industry.

3.       Energy, merupakan sumber daya yang potensial untuk pembangkit listri dan sebagainya.

Usaha-usaha atau tindakan yang dilakukan dalam revolusi biru misalnya:

1.       Membersihkan permukaan laut dari kotoran berupa cairan minyak, limbah beracun dan pencemaran lainnya.

2.       Menghindari penangkapan ikan yang tak kenal batas dan menciptakan undang-undang perlindungan.

3.       Melarang penggunaan alat yang dapat membahayakn orgnisme laut.

Ocean

These vast bodies of water surrounding the continents are critical to humankind. But overfishing and global warming threaten to leave this vital habitat barren.

The ocean is a continuous body of saltwater that covers more than 70 percent of the Earth's surface. Ocean currents govern the world's weather and churn a kaleidoscope of life. Humans depend on these teeming waters for comfort and survival, but global warming and overfishing threaten to leave the ocean agitated and empty.

Geographers divide the ocean into four major sections: the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic. Smaller ocean regions are called seas, gulfs, and bays, such as the Mediterranean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and the Bay of Bengal. Stand-alone bodies of saltwater like the Caspian Sea and the Great Salt Lake are distinct from the world's oceans.

The oceans hold about 320 million cubic miles (1.35 billion cubic kilometers) of water, which is roughly 97 percent of Earth's water supply. The water is about 3.5 percent salt and contains traces of all chemical elements found on Earth. The oceans absorb the sun's heat, transferring it to the atmosphere and distributing it around the world via the ever-moving ocean currents. This drives global weather patterns and acts as a heater in the winter and an air conditioner in the summer.

Life began in the ocean, and the ocean remains home to the majority of Earth's plants and animals—from tiny single-celled organisms to the blue whale, the planet's largest living animal.

Most of the ocean's plant life consists of microscopic algae called phytoplankton that float at the surface and through photosynthesis produce about half of the oxygen that humans and all other terrestrial creatures breathe. Seaweed and kelp are big algae easily visible to the naked eye. Marine plants with roots, like sea grasses, can only survive as deep as the sun’s rays can support photosynthesis—about 650 feet (200 meters). Nearly half of the ocean is more than 9,800 feet (3,000 meters) deep.

The deepest reaches of the ocean are largely devoid of life, but biological hotspots appear around places like hydrothermal vents. These chimney-like structures spew gases and mineral-rich water from beneath the Earth's crust. Tube worms, clams, and mussels gather around the vents to feed on heat-loving bacteria. Bizarre fish with sensitive eyes, translucent fangs, and bioluminescent lures lurk about in nearby waters.

Other fish, octopuses, squid, eels, dolphins, and whales ply the open waters while crabs, lobsters, starfish, oysters, and snails crawl and scoot along the ocean bottom. Creatures like jellyfish lack their own way to get around and are mostly left to the whim of the wind and currents. Mammals like otters, walruses, and even polar bears also depend on the ocean for their survival and dip in and out as their biology requires.

Colonies of polyps form coral reefs as they die. The reefs are mostly found in shallow tropical waters and are home to a brilliant mosaic of polyps, plants, and fish. Coral reefs are also visible victims of human activity. Global warming, siltation, pollution, and other phenomena are stressing the corals to death, and over-zealous fishers net more food than the reefs can restore.

Human activities impact nearly all parts of the ocean. Lost and discarded nets continue to lethally snare fish, seabirds, and marine mammals as they drift. Ships spill oil and garbage and transport critters to alien habitats unprepared for their arrival. Mangrove forests are cleared for homes and industry. More than half of the U.S. population lives in coastal areas, spilling garbage and sewage into the ocean. Fertilizer runoff from farms turns vast swaths of the ocean into dead zones, including a New Jersey-size area in the Gulf of Mexico. The greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is turning ocean waters acidic, and an influx of freshwater from melting glaciers threatens to alter the weather-driving currents.

Conservationists urge international protections to protect and replenish dwindling ocean fish stocks and reductions in greenhouse gases to curb global. 

Rain Forest

Incubators of Life

In Brazil, which houses 30 percent of the remaining tropical rain forest on Earth, more than 50,000 square miles of rain forest were lost to deforestation between 2000 and 2005. Biologists worry about the long-term consequences. Drought may be one. Some rain forests, including the Amazon, began experiencing drought in the 1990s, possibly due to deforestation and global warming.

Efforts to discourage deforestation, mainly through sustainable-logging initiatives, are underway on a very limited basis but have had a negligible impact so far.

The rain forest is nearly self-watering. Plants release water into the atmosphere through a process called transpiration. In the tropics, each canopy tree can release about 200 gallons (760 liters) of water each year. The moisture helps create the thick cloud cover that hangs over most rain forests. Even when not raining, these clouds keep the rain forest humid and warm.

Plants in the rain forest grow very close together and contend with the constant threat of insect predators. They have adapted by making chemicals that researchers have found useful as medicines. Bioprospecting, or going into the rain forest in search of plants that can be used in foods, cosmetics, and medicines, has become big business during the past decade, and the amount that native communities are compensated for this varies from almost nothing to a share in later profits.

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimates that 70 percent of the anti-cancer plants identified so far are rain forest plants. A new drug under development by a private pharmaceutical company, possibly for treating HIV, is Calanolide A, which is derived from a tree discovered on Borneo, according to NCI.

Many trees and plants, like orchids, have been removed from the rain forest and cultivated. Brazil nut trees are one valuable tree that refuses to grow anywhere but in undisturbed sections of the Amazon rain forest. There, it is pollinated by bees that also visit orchids, and its seeds are spread by the agouti, a small tree mammal.

Global Warming

What cause global warming?

Scientists have spent decades figuring out what is causing global warming. They've looked at the natural cycles and events that are known to influence climate. But the amount and pattern of warming that's been measured can't be explained by these factors alone. The only way to explain the pattern is to include the effect of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted by humans.

To bring all this information together, the United Nations formed a group of scientists called the International Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The IPCC meets every few years to review the latest scientific findings and write a report summarizing all that is known about global warming. Each report represents a consensus, or agreement, among hundreds of leading scientists.

One of the first things scientists learned is that there are several greenhouse gases responsible for warming, and humans emit them in a variety of ways. Most come from the combustion of fossil fuels in cars, factories and electricity production. The gas responsible for the most warming is carbon dioxide, also called CO2. Other contributors include methane released from landfills and agriculture (especially from the digestive systems of grazing animals), nitrous oxide from fertilizers, gases used for refrigeration and industrial processes, and the loss of forests that would otherwise store CO2.

Different greenhouse gases have very different heat-trapping abilities. Some of them can even trap more heat than CO2. A molecule of methane produces more than 20 times the warming of a molecule of CO2. Nitrous oxide is 300 times more powerful than CO2. Other gases, such as chlorofluorocarbons (which have been banned in much of the world because they also degrade the ozone layer), have heat-trapping potential thousands of times greater than CO2. But because their concentrations are much lower than CO2, none of these gases adds as much warmth to the atmosphere as CO2 does.

In order to understand the effects of all the gases together, scientists tend to talk about all greenhouse gases in terms of the equivalent amount of CO2. Since 1990, yearly emissions have gone up by about 6 billion metric tons of "carbon dioxide equivalent" worldwide, more than a 20% increase

The effect of Climate Change

Signs Are Everywhere

The planet is warming, from North Pole to South Pole, and everywhere in between. Globally, the mercury is already up more than 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius), and even more in sensitive polar regions. And the effects of rising temperatures aren’t waiting for some far-flung future. They’re happening right now. Signs are appearing all over, and some of them are surprising. The heat is not only melting glaciers and sea ice, it’s also shifting precipitation patterns and setting animals on the move.

Some impacts from increasing temperatures are already happening.

• Ice is melting worldwide, especially at the Earth’s poles. This includes mountain glaciers, ice sheets covering West Antarctica and Greenland, and Arctic sea ice.
• Researcher Bill Fraser has tracked the decline of the Adélie penguins on Antarctica, where their numbers have fallen from 32,000 breeding pairs to 11,000 in 30 years.
• Sea level rise became faster over the last century.
• Some butterflies, foxes, and alpine plants have moved farther north or to higher, cooler areas.
• Precipitation (rain and snowfall) has increased across the globe, on average.
• Spruce bark beetles have boomed in Alaska thanks to 20 years of warm summers. The insects have chewed up 4 million acres of spruce trees.
• Other effects could happen later this century, if warming continues.
• Sea levels are expected to rise between 7 and 23 inches (18 and 59 centimeters) by the end of the century, and continued melting at the poles could add between 4 and 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters).
• Hurricanes and other storms are likely to become stronger.
• Species that depend on one another may become out of sync. For example, plants could bloom earlier than their pollinating insects become active.
• Floods and droughts will become more common. Rainfall in Ethiopia, where droughts are already common, could decline by 10 percent over the next 50 years.
• Less fresh water will be available. If the Quelccaya ice cap in Peru continues to melt at its current rate, it will be gone by 2100, leaving thousands of people who rely on it for drinking water and electricity without a source of either.
• Some diseases will spread, such as malaria carried by mosquitoes.
• Ecosystems will change—some species will move farther north or become more successful; others won’t be able to move and could become extinct. Wildlife research scientist Martyn Obbard has found that since the mid-1980s, with less ice on which to live and fish for food, polar bears have gotten considerably skinnier. Polar bear biologist Ian Stirling has found a similar pattern in Hudson Bay. He fears that if sea ice disappears, the polar bears will as well.

What Can We Do?

The evidence that humans are causing global warming is strong, but the question of what to do about it remains controversial. Economics, sociology, and politics are all important factors in planning for the future.

Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases (GHGs) today, the Earth would still warm by another degree Fahrenheit or so. But what we do from today forward makes a big difference. Depending on our choices, scientists predict that the Earth could eventually warm by as little as 2.5 degrees or as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

A commonly cited goal is to stabilize GHG concentrations around 450-550 parts per million (ppm), or about twice pre-industrial levels. This is the point at which many believe the most damaging impacts of climate change can be avoided. Current concentrations are about 380 ppm, which means there isn't much time to lose. According to the IPCC, we'd have to reduce GHG emissions by 50% to 80% of what they're on track to be in the next century to reach this level.

Is this possible?

Many people and governments are already working hard to cut greenhouse gases, and everyone can help.

Researchers Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow at Princeton University have suggested one approach that they call "stabilization wedges." This means reducing GHG emissions from a variety of sources with technologies available in the next few decades, rather than relying on an enormous change in a single area. They suggest 7 wedges that could each reduce emissions, and all of them together could hold emissions at approximately current levels for the next 50 years, putting us on a potential path to stabilize around 500 ppm.

There are many possible wedges, including improvements to energy efficiency and vehicle fuel economy (so less energy has to be produced), and increases in wind and solar power, hydrogen produced from renewable sources, biofuels (produced from crops), natural gas, and nuclear power. There is also the potential to capture the carbon dioxide emitted from fossil fuels and store it underground—a process called "carbon sequestration."

• In addition to reducing the gases we emit to the atmosphere, we can also increase the amount of gases we take out of the atmosphere. Plants and trees absorb CO2 as they grow, "sequestering" carbon naturally. Increasing forestlands and making changes to the way we farm could increase the amount of carbon we're storing.
• Some of these technologies have drawbacks, and different communities will make different decisions about how to power their lives, but the good news is that there are a variety of options to put us on a path toward a stable climate.