It’s probably obvious, but thanks to Hurricane Irene and her imminent arrival, events are canceled this weekend. We’ll be posting new dates on the Film page as soon as we figure out what and when we can reschedule.

Stay safe and dry this weekend, and think positive thoughts about the Park!

WATER (or the secret life of objects) seeks to explore human relationships to the environment through the science fiction tale of a world-altering flood of biblical proportions. Taking place in three parts, in locations and languages from all over the world, WATER introduces us to characters before, during, and after cataclysmic environmental change–from an oblivious Norwegian couple aboard a yacht, to a young girl in Malaysia burying her father at sea, to a scientist who must sell her technology to purify the remaining potable water to the highest bidder. At turns haunting, hilarious, and provocative, WATER explores how we as a global community overcome environmental and personal tragedy, surrender to it, or exist in the spaces between.

Initiated and led by director Daniella Topol and playwright Sheila Callaghan, WATER is being devised by a creative team comprised of Katie Down (sound), Leah Gelpe (video and projections), Mimi Lien (set), and Tyler Micoleau (lights).

Featured Workshop in Epic Theatre Ensemble’s Sunshine Series 2011, Produced by Vicious Bear Productions in association with Epic, Solar One, and the 14^th Street Y.

WATER (or the secret life of objects)
July 7, 8, 9 at 7:30pm
The Theater at the 14th Street Y
344 East 14th Street, between 1st and 2nd Avenues

Admission is FREE.

Seating is extremely limited. Reservations are required. For reservations and information, visit EpicTheatreEnsemble.org

What is our relationship to water as NYC residents? How often do New Yorkers think about water or even remember that four of our five boroughs are located on islands? In the mind’s eye of the average resident, New York is more likely to be a city of concrete canyons, not bays, rivers, and wetlands that are home to other species besides people. Perhaps that is because today we are used to seeing waterways as dividers that lie between our useful spaces, stormwater as a nuisance for the municipality, and potable water as a problem for engineers. The average New Yorker neither has an active relationship with the water bodies that surround the city nor gives much thought to how we know that the quality of our tap water is safe and secure. But when we start thinking more about water, we find that it has seeped into many seemingly unrelated aspects of our urban lives a long time ago.

On a large scale, it is no exaggeration to single out water as humanity’s most precious resource.  After all,  it is the foundation of life itself. Water is much a part of our bodies as it is an unseen but essential component in the production of food, clothing, energy, and in the operation of industry, buildings, and transportation. In nature, it is a renewable resource thanks to the brilliant simplicity of the hydrologic cycle. In places of dense human activity, however, its lifecycle is often linear: from fresh water to wastewater, which, even when treated, never regains the purity that makes it again suitable for human use. Considering that only 1% of the Earth’s water is suitable for human use, we must reconsider our relationship to water to make it more sustainable for the sake of ecological stability as well as our own security.

The City of New York has an intimate relationship with water. Water defined our city’s physical boundaries and laid the foundation for its financial prosperity. New York, like many cities before and after it, was founded on water for reasons of transportation and, therefore, trade. The City became the financial powerhouse we know today largely due to the Hudson River and the Eerie Canal. And yet today NYC’s port has shrunk dramatically, prompting industry and advocates to re-envision the function of the waterfront in an innovative and sustainable way.

New York’s waterways still retain the polluting footprint of recent heavy industry. While water quality in the Hudson and East Rivers have improved, other waterways, like the Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek have recently earned federal Superfund designations due to heavy post-industrial contamination. Government-led efforts are on the way to clean them up, and community groups are teaming up with landscape designers, ecologists, and engineers to devise strategies to keep those waterways clean after the remediation is complete. Some strategies focus on limiting the volume of water that washes over our streets, into sewers, and then into water bodies when it rains while others explore how we can use water in our buildings more smartly and reuse it when possible.

The remaining piers that bristle out of the water all around Manhattan appear to most New Yorkers as the most visible vestige of a more active waterfront. Some have been reclaimed by enterprising individuals and organizations to be transformed into destinations; the Frying Pan on Pier 66 comes to mind. Nevertheless, such destinations are endpoints, often of a lengthy journey from the nearest subway. Rethinking transportation, some urban planners and designers are re-imagining these endpoints as hubs and positing that waterborne transportation can relieve NYC’s roads and subways that chocking with traffic. In that case, water can once again become a connecting medium instead of a divider, much like it had been in the days before Fulton’s Ferry was made obsolete by the Brooklyn Bridge.

Our waterfront must innovate not only in the interest of health, commerce, and connectivity, but also to engage people by offering them access to water and opportunities for recreation. Destinations like the Brooklyn Bridge Park and Hudson River Park, water sports like kayaking and small boating, all serve to grant access and allow New Yorkers opportunities to learn from and relax on the water.

Water, however, is both our friend and foe. As a coastal city bounded by water, New York is especially vulnerable to sea level rise. Last year’s exhibition “Rising Currents” at the Museum of Modern Art asked several groups of architects and landscape designers to imagine how the city’s landscape might cope with the disastrous invasion of water. If one were to take this scenario a step further, one could imagine the world transformed by an excess of water, both of the macro level of society and the micro level of individual human lives. This feat of imagination is being undertaken by artists and actors to help us glimpse one possible dystopian future, a future that, unwittingly, we might have helped to bring about.

We at Solar One think a lot about New York’s relationship water. After all, we are an organization located on the East River next to a combined sewer overflow discharge point; we manage a park of water-saving native plants; and we look forward to building a water-smart building, Solar 2. As part of our ongoing series, NYC the Future Metropolis, we invited some of our friends to share their thoughts about the importance of water to New York City on Sunday, May 8. We hope you can join us as well.

Please see the event page for more details: solar1.org/nycfm

SAVE THE DATE:

Future Metropolis Volume III
“Water in New York”
May 8, 2011
5-7pm
University Settlement
184 Eldridge Street
New York, NY 10002

Tickets on sale in Early April

Future Metropolis Volume III: “Water in New York” is part of the
New Museum’s Festival of Ideas for The New City,
running May 4-8, 2011.
For more information about the festival, please visit:
http://www.festivalofideasnyc.com/

New York City The Future Metropolis is an ongoing series of events focused on creative thinkers who are using their expertise to make New York City a more sustainable place to live, work, and do business. Each event is an exciting, fast-paced showcase of pioneering ideas and cutting-edge research, presented in a way that both inspires innovation in green industry professionals and remains accessible to the general public.

The theme of the next installment in the series will be “Water in New York.” This theme will cover the water bodies surrounding the city, the ways that water gets used in the city, and the cultural significance of water to New York. The speakers will cover a wide range of topics that relate to water, for example: harbor ecology, rain/grey water harvesting, green infrastructure, the impact of hydrofracking on NYC’s water supply, creating an innovative waterfront, designing landscapes and buildings with water in mind, learning from and on the water, and art created with or in response to NYC’s water.

[im]pure essence is the result of a unique collaboration between the student artists of LaGuardia Arts High School; the community of the 14th Street Y; WATER, the secret life of objects, a multi-media climate change play focusing on water and its indispensable (and sometimes scary) role in human life;  and Solar One, NYC’s green energy, arts and education center.

To create the work in the show, 14th Street Y staff collected stories, memories, myths and impressions about water from a variety of their constituents, including small children and seniors. The stories were then given to the WATER creative team, and passed on to the artists. Using mostly reclaimed and recycled materials from Materials for the Arts, the student-artists used the stories as a starting point for their work. The work is being displayed in the LABA gallery in the lobby of the Y, and has been starting many conversations among the Y community!

On Tuesday March 15, we’ll be having a reception with all the work on display, some drinks and snacks, activities like making origami creatures and collecting “water confessions” from our guests. These will be invaluable in helping us develop WATER: the secret life of objects, and increase our understanding of the essential role water plays in our human world.

The artists showing their work in the show are: Athena Beck, Rachel Berger, Cleo Bergman, Galeena, Grace Felton, Jade Johnson, Yasmin Kelly, Cindy Lee and Alyssa Rosete. Check out a preview below!

[im]pure essence Closing Reception
Tuesday March 15, 2011
7:00-9:00pm
At the 14th Street Y
344 East 14th Street between 1st and 2nd Aves
Free & Open to the Public

What will NYC look like in twenty years? Will our city become more sustainable and efficient with the resources it consumes as its population reaches nine million in 2030?  Is green really the new black – as in the new norm – for New Yorkers?

We New Yorkers can do a lot to live up to the green potential offered by the history, the geography, and the ingenuity of our city. Sustainability is not a goal but a process, and in order to be most effective, it should shift all aspects of society onto a greener course. From projects affecting the whole city, like the smart electric grid, to small adjustments to personal habits, like recycling, change for the greener must be systemic in order for sustainability to take root in New York.

The systems that run New York – or any other city – are not just physical entities. They are best identified by asking not “What?” but “How?” For example, the question, “What can make our building systems more resource efficient?” can be answered simply: “Do an energy audit and fix the problems that are found.” However, if we ask, “How do we stop the building from being wasteful from now on?” the answer becomes a lot broader: “We do an audit, fix the building, teach the owner, the operators, and the tenants how to use it properly, and establish protocols for checking that everything is running smoothly from now on.” That second answer shows that to fix our carbon problem we need to establish new systems, both hard and soft infrastructures for living and working in a more sustainable way.

The ideas for smarter, cheaper, and more environmentally responsible methods to run a city like New York should inform the evolution of existing infrastructures or establish the necessary new ones. Infrastructures, by definition, have a broad reach, from the generation and delivery of electricity to getting rid of waste water; from food supply to waste disposal; from growing our businesses to deconstructing our buildings; from teaching our future designers, engineers, and other creative professionals to incorporate the triple bottom line into their visions of the future, to preparing the workforce for making those creative visions come to life in a way that works. And perhaps most important of all is the infrastructure offered by our growing collective certainty that we can achieve our goals in a smarter, cheaper, and yet more environmentally responsible way.

In trying to catch a glimpse of the transformation of New York over the next twenty years, we at Solar One decided to put together an evening with the experts who are currently working on developing new (or improving old) infrastructures. Whatever our city looks like and however it functions in twenty years, right now we can only see it through the lens of today’s innovative ideas and discoveries. However, concrete plans have already been put forth by the city government, starting with PlaNYC to give the framework for moving New York towards sustainability. More specific objectives have been set forth in city-wide governmental plans as well as smaller scale private-sector and academic projects. Examples of such forward-looking projects include water quality management through green infrastructure; waterfront revitalization and improving the city’s sustainable food supply through short-sea shipping; and creating ecological art both as a form of expression and means to raise public awareness.

The speakers invited to NYC Future Metropolis vol. 2 will address these and other infrastructure-related topics directly and in discussion of their projects. Please visit the NYC The Future Metropolis section for more information.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Green Screens program and Solar One Co-Present Carbon Nation at the Walter Reade Theater on Thursday, February 10 at 6:30pm

Screening followed by a Q&A with the director Peter Byck, Solar One Executive Director Chris Collins, Solar One Green Workforce Development Director Diallo Shabazz, and a reception.

On Thursday February 10, Solar One is proud to be co-presenting the film Carbon Nation with the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Green Screens program at the beautiful Walter Reade Theater. Carbon Nation is a film by Peter Byck that explores potential alternatives to carbon fuel from one-armed Texas cotton farmer Cliff Etheridge’s efforts to pull together an enormous wind farm, to green jobs innovator Van Jones. This inspiring film presents vital solutions to a thorny problem and in the process reveals a thriving tradition of American ingenuity.

Friends of Solar One may purchase tickets at the $9 Affiliate price, a $3 discount off the general admission price. Film Society members purchase tickets at the $7 Member price. A great bargain for a great film!

Purchase tickets online by selecting the “Affiliate” ticket type HERE.

You can use this link that goes straight to the online purchase page for CARBON NATION:
http://www.filmlinc.com/tix.php?p=22298&b=1

Or purchase in person at the Walter Reade Theater’s Box Office:
The box office opens at 12:30 PM Monday-Friday, and one half hour before the first screening on Saturday/Sunday. It closes every day 15 minutes after the start of the last show. If there are no evening screenings, the box office closes at 6pm. For more information call 212-875-5601 during hours of operation.

IMPORTANT: Please printout this page! You will need to present the printout at the Walter Reade Theater Box office to purchase tickets or redeem an online order at this discount price.

Visit FilmLinc.com for more information about Carbon Nation. http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/gs/carbonnation.html

View the trailer for the film: http://carbonnationmovie.com/

Thursday, February 10 at 6:30pm
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street, Upper Level
Bet Broadway & Amsterdam Aves

Some of the pictures map positive changes, like the reclamation of Mesopotamian marsh lands in Iraq, but most show more sinister changes like the growing hole in the ozone, the shrinking of the Aral Sea in central Asia and other harbingers of potentially catastrophic climate change. Fascinating, albeit scary, stuff!

Tapped, 2009, 76 mins.

Is access to clean drinking water a basic human right, or a commodity that should be bought and sold like any other article of commerce? Stephanie Soechtig’s debut feature is an unflinching examination of the big business of bottled water. From the producers of Who Killed the Electric Car? and I.O.U.S.A., this timely documentary is a behind-the-scenes look into the unregulated and unseen world of an industry that aims to privatize and sell back the one resource that ought never to become a commodity: our water.

Speakers:

Elizabeth Royte is the author of Bottlemania- How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It; Garbarge Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash and The Tapir’s Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of Tropical Rain Forest.

William Schwartz – Director at TapIt, a New York based initiative that aims to build a global network of businesses that volunteer to serve tap water to the public.

Buck Moorehead – Co-founder and vice-president of NYH20, a NYC- based citizens group working to protect NYS’s water from hydraulic fracturing, a toxic process to extract natural gas from the Marcellus Shale.

Carter H. Strickland, Jr. is the Deputy Commissioner for Sustainability, New York City Department of Environmental Protection.

Short subject: The Story of Stuff

The 2010 Solar-Powered Film Series is sponsored by Green Mountain Energy!

Join us for the last Family Day of 2010! Come fishing at Solar One!

On Saturday September 11, we’ll be kicking off the 2010 Solar-Powered Film Series as the NYC stop on Rooftop Films Gasland tour.

This will be a rare ticketed event, tickets are $10 and can be purchased on the Rooftop Films website. If there are still tickets available on the day of the event, they will be available to purchase at the door. Solar One will not be selling tickets, but we’ll try and update as we get closer to the date and let people know if/when the show sells out.

Tickets are $10, available HERE!

Thurs Sept 17: A Sea Change, 2008, 85 mins.
Fri Sept 18: The Garden, 2008, 80 mins.
Sat Sept 19: Burning In the Sun, 2009, 65 mins.
Rain Date for any of the above: Sun Sept 20

For trailers and descriptions, please visit http://solar1.org/events/film.

Thursday September 17

Short: Bird Bath Bakery (from From Elegance to Earthworms)

Feature: A Sea Change
To focus public attention on the dangers of ocean acidification, film maker Sven Huseby embarks on a picturesque odyssey that leads him to small fishing villages whose cash crop is at risk, native communities whose way of life is being threatened, activists working to combat the crisis, and individuals who are changing their lifestyles to make a difference at the most local level.

Speakers: Angela Alston & Baerbel Hoenisch

In addition to making the award-winning film Reclaiming Water (2003), Angela Alston has served as publicist/outreach director for her own work and for other projects, including the Loisaida Cortos Latino Film Festival, Listen With Your Eyes, and Alwan for the Arts. For two years, Angela was Workshop Director for CineWomen NY. She also served as Public Affairs Coordinator for Cornish College of the Arts for three years and is the former Technical Director of Democracy Now!

Baerbel Hoenisch’s research interests focus on understanding the role of the ocean and the effects of marine carbonate chemistry on global climate change. As she was originally trained as a marine biologist, her way of approaching paleoceanographic questions often includes a biological component. She is specifically interested in the validation and application of the boron isotope proxy for past seawater pH.

Saturday, September 12th, 7pm

Short: Loyale (taken from From Elegance to Earthworms)

Feature: FLOW: For Love of Water

Experts are calling the World Water Crisis the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century. This film presents the case against the growing privatization of the world’s dwindling fresh water supply with an unflinching eye on politics, pollution, human rights, and the emergence of a domineering world water cartel.

Speaker: John Mundy, Project Manager, Majora Carter Group

John Mundy serves as Project Manager for the Majora Carter Group. The Majora Carter Group is a pioneering consulting group that builds highly productive relationships between organizations and across sectors to help civic, business and nonprofit organizations understand how to meet their needs by working together through green economic avenues.

Sometime in the near future, you won’t even need to think twice about frying up that prize striper you hooked out of the Hudson.

After twenty-five years of court appeals and other evasive measures employed by General Electric, the first of what will be many scoops of PCB-laden sludge was dredged from the Hudson River this past Friday as the result of a “good-faith” agreement with the EPA.  The massive effort, only Phase One of the project, is expected to require the around-the-clock operation of twelve dredges six days a week through 2015; assuming this phase runs its course, this would equal 48,672 hours for the removal of sediment that has been accumulating since the end of the Wisconsin glaciation period around 12,000 years ago, but took two GE plants and other chemical facilities only thirty years to contaminate.  The dried sludge will then be trucked to a landfill in Texas, while the river water will be pumped through a filtration plant and returned to continue its meandering course.

Nearly 200 miles of the river from Hudson Falls to the tip of Manhattan, just under two-thirds of the Hudson’s total length, was declared a Superfund site in 1984, and though GE has now adopted a veneer of compliance, it also continues to challenge the constitutionality of the legislation – the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) -that determines Superfund status and culpability.  As part of the agreement, GE has also given itself an out clause – it will review the status of the project in 2010 and can then decide to opt out.  The total cost of this phase is estimated at $750 million but could be much greater, though GE has declined to provide an estimate, a decision that, compounded by these other compromises, does little to alleviate the pervasive skepticism within the environmental community.

Still, the fact that the clean-up project is now more than simply a contentious point of debate is cause for at least tepid celebration.  I imagine most of those keeping a close eye on this will remain patient until the 2010 review process is complete before any claims of restitution will finally be made.  Meanwhile, for the past quarter century, those PCBs and their fellow contaminants have been just sitting there in the river bottom ooze, waiting for the party responsible to own up and make that first move.

Sources: “Dredging of Pollutants Begins in Hudson”, The New York Times, May 15, 2009;“”Reclaiming a River”, The New York Times, May 16, 2009; “Shaking Off “Man’s Taint, Hudson Pulses With Life”, The New York Times, June 9, 1996; “What was the Wisconsin Glaciation?” Wisegeek.com;“25-Year-Old Hudson River Cleanup Plan Starts Today”, Running Scared (blogs.villagevoice.com), May 15, 2009; “Pollution and the Hudson River”, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies (www.ecostudies.org); Hudson River Sloop Clearwater (www.clearwater.org).

Harbor Seal at Stuyvesant Cove Park

On Saturday March 28th at about 8:00am Stuyvesant Cove Park had a visitor stop by for a while….a Harbor Seal!

It was hanging out on the rocky outcropping in the East River at about 20th street. Many people gathered around to see the seal and to make sure it was okay.  According to CRESLI

“Population counts over the last 12 years have indicated a dramatic increase in the number of seals utilizing Long Island’s waters, as well as a shift in the species composition of the region…”

So to see a seal hauled up on a rock in the East River or other bodies of water around the city is not such an uncommon occurrence.  Look at CRESLI for viewing guidelines when you see a seal.  This however was the first one that we know of that came to the rocky outcropping since Stuyvesant Cove Park was built. For more information on marine mammals and rescue efforts go to Riverhead Foundation

At about 10am just after the police and fireman had arrived the seal, which didn’t seem to be hurt or in distress, slipped back into the water and swam away. Photographers from a few different newspapers came by to get a glimpse of the seal, but the above photo (taken by park manager Melissa McDonald) with the exception of a few cell phone pictures, was the only photo to capture the seal.

The seal looked like a yearling, which means it is between the ages of 1- 2yrs old and a length of 3.5′-4′. Harbor seals mature between 4-6 years and live for about 25 years. The increase in seal sightings in the Hudson River Estuary and around Long Island are a testament to increased water quality as well as a reaction to the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.

The potential of wind turbine technology to provide for our growing electricity needs on a utility scale increases every year as technology improves and its costs decline versus rising fossil fuel prices. However, wind power is limited by two key factors: time and location. Put simply, the wind doesn’t always blow and the areas with the highest wind resource are often located far away from population centers or in areas where development is controversial.

Developing turbines miles off shore along coastal shelves, where wind is more constant, speeds are higher and the imposing 30-story scale of today’s turbines are minimized to the size of thimble from land, may help mitigate both of these obstacles going forward. In spite of these advantages, recent large scale project proposals to develop offshore wind in the the Northeast have either succumbed to local opposition or escalating project costs. However, new proposals, including a few in the New York City harbor area, are again on the table, and important allies – including Mayor Bloomberg – have come to advocate for its development in the region.

KC Sahl, the New York Project Director for Bluewater Wind, one of the nation’s leading developers of offshore wind projects, will speak about offshore wind turbine technology and potential in the local context. 

The Solar-Powered Film Series returns to Solar One for the 4th year with two programs of environmental features and shorts, plus games, contests, a scavenger hunt and director Q&As and discussions with experts on various environmental topics. Presented by Solar One and Green Edge Collaborative; for full schedule and more information, click here. Limited chairs will be available, first come first serve; please feel free to bring your own. Please note that documentaries may contain language unsuitable for children.

Thursday August 21 at 8PM
Environmental Art:


Running Fence, 1978, 58 mins.
An engrossing document of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s efforts to build a 24 1/2-mile-long, 18-foot-high fence of white fabric across the hills of northern California.


Christo’s Valley Curtain, 1973, 28 mins.
The first collaboration between the Maysles Brothers and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and recipient of an Academy Award Nomination.

Friday August 22 at 8pm
Water Shorts:

Gimme Green, 2007, 27 mins.
Gimme Green peers behind the curtain of the $40-billion industry that fuels our nation’s largest irrigated crop—the lawn.


Invisible Creek, 2004, 8 mins.
Travel down the most polluted waterway in America, Newtown Creek, located on the border between Brooklyn and Queens in New York City.


City of Water, 2007, 30 mins.
City of Water explores the aspirations of public officials, environmentalists, academics, community activists, recreational boaters and everyday New Yorkers for a diverse, vibrant waterfront at a time when the shoreline is changing faster than at any other time in New York’s history.
Plus a discussion of CSOs (Combined Sewer Overflows) with Cortney Worrall of the Coastal Marine Resource Center

Saturday August 23 at 8pm
Green Building:


The Greening of Southie, 2008, 81mins.
Building Boston’s first LEED Gold-certified building turns out to be harder than anyone thought. The Greening of Southie shows what happens when you try to build the city of tomorrow… today.
Plus Q&A with director Ian Cheney

See you at the movies!

Water is heavily utilized in all forms of electricity generation. In fact the cooling needs of nuclear plants use much more water than even a hydro-electric dam. When you conserve energy you save $$, carbon emissions, and water. Win, win, win…. I like it.

Check out a great article on CNet here.

By now you’ve probably heard most of the doomsday scenarios regarding global warming. Temperatures and sea levels are rising, glaciers and ice caps are melting, and shifting weather patterns are wreaking havoc with ways of life that have otherwise changed little for centuries. Climate change has been connected with everything from water-rights squabbles to failing crops to an increasing prevalence of malaria and dengue fever. Some scientists have speculated that these scenarios may be avoided by sequestering greenhouse gases in large bodies of water, but this short-sighted approach begs the question: what exactly are these emissions doing to our oceans?

“Ocean acidification” was a hot topic at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). According to researchers, our oceans have lower pH levels now than at any point in the last 40 million years, and at the present rate these levels will drop by another .3 units by the end of the century. This is due to the chemical reactions that result when carbon dioxide is dissolved in water, forming carbonic acid. Over the long term, this process could affect the food chain in significant ways. First, many organisms will not grow as large or will produce fewer offspring, as increased levels of CO2 render respiration and other physiological processes less efficient. Also, the absorption of greenhouse gases is likely to create dead-zones at some depths where the CO2-oxygen ratios are too low to support life. This is apparently already happening and is somewhat similar to the poisonous volcanic crater lakes that exist in central Africa, where high levels of CO2 and other gases are kept at the lake bottom due to water pressure — until something stirs up the water, leading to the release of noxious plumes that can have lethal, large-scale consequences, such as the 1700 people killed in Cameroon in 1986.

It is unlikely that the presence of such dead-zones in the oceans will present any significant danger to human populations, except in that such zones will lower the productivity of the ecosystem, affecting subsistence fishermen and others who rely on the sea for their sustenance and livelihood. But there is one more way in which ocean acidification could have serious consequences. Shellfish, coral and echinoderms may not be able to form their exoskeletons, as the calcium carbonate on which they depend dissolves during carbonic acid formation. One researcher referred to the massive volcanic explosions at the end of the Permian period 250 million years ago which caused oceanic pH levels to change suddenly, leading to the extinction of 90% of oceanic species, particularly those that make shells from calcium carbonate. Another researcher, looking into the combined effects of acidification and temperature increase, conducted experiments on purple sea urchins that replicated the ecological conditions that will exist in 2100 if emissions levels continue unabated. Her results indicated that the urchins had to work up to three times harder to create their shells, and that these shells were often deformed.

All this goes to show that you can’t simply shrug off greenhouse gases by pumping them underwater.