Reporting from COP27 in the hot desert of Sharm El Sheik Egypt

IMF champion calls for someone, everyone, to speak for ocean life

More important than talking is actually deploying the ocean restoration action that will save our oceans

Time is so short

At a fantastic Round Table workshop organized by Oceanic Global on Friday, a side event to COP27 held in the palatial Sharma El Sheik Park Regency Hotel, top UNFCCC officials commented in a matter-of-fact fashion that oceans have never been part of their efforts but that this hour-long round table discussion they were hosting with a dozen or so participants is a start toward a change.

Being in that Round Table I asked the UNFCCC officials how it could be possible that the Blue Planet has been embargoed by the UNFCCC for all these years?  Of course, the answer to this question is what so many have suspected. That is what the Emission Reductionistas cabal of the UNFCCC makes clear by their pronouncement, only emission reduction and energy world ‘regime change’ is and has been on the agenda. Silly ideas like restoring Nature to health and vitality have been excluded or marginalized. Only now are the thousands of participants in the UNFCCC beginning to say they are willing to talk about adding 72% of this blue planet for their consideration, albeit after the 27 COP meetings of the past 30+ years, and perhaps too late to provide the perfect solution to global warming the late great Professor John Martin presented and called for 30+  years ago, ocean restoration!

What happens when the world doesn’t listen

The Bering Sea has long been known as the part of the world’s oceans suffering the fastest from ocean acidification.. In 2012 NOAA warned that definitive science predicted mass dying of the crabs from ocean acidification in as little as 1 decade!

Today the cataclysmic widespread acid death of billions of Alaska King crabs in the Bering Sea is proof positive of the grave sin of omission by the UNFCCC. Their endless and exclusive call for emission reduction, and calls for fossil energy regime change… have provided a Neroesque fiddling and finagling of words alone while the blue world burns (in acid). Recall the parable of the frog put into a pot of water that is ever so slowly brought to a boil, the poor frog doesn’t realize until it is too late that frog stew is being prepared! OK, so it’s not the frogs but rather the Bering Sea King Crabs that are in the stew following decades of being excluded by the UNFCCC.

Apologies for the hectoring about the UNFCCC speaking directly about the barriers to entry that have existed for oceans to be considered as a vital part of their work for the past 30+ years…. and their plan to perform penance for those sins by announcing now they are willing to begin talking about how to design a process to one day include the oceans. All in the ocean world including its countless sea life, and those who dare to try to speak for the fish, the whales, and the plankton, are admonished to be patient as this will take time.

The UNFCCC will surely now do the right thing and dutifully finger its rosary and prepare some language expecting said words to be ready to put forward to debate on whether the ocean should be part of the UNFCCC climate considerations REAL SOON… as in by COP29 or COP30.

That’s just the formal discussion about the potential inclusion of the oceans into the UNFCCC process, NOT the specifics on the role of the oceans in Climate Change and the UNFCCC recommendations on what to do.

It is so comforting to hear this wonderful news, in the proverbial context of the pot of seawater so rapidly turning into scalding deadly acid, sea creatures one and all can rest easy knowing that the UNFCCC, in the proper passage of time, will get around to talking about their tortuous demise. Of course, this is wonderful as who could possibly want the UNFCCC to give any of its attention and sage wisdom to anything but ’emission reductions.’

Pardon me while I pray to God on the great white telephone! (What sailors who get seasick do 🤮)

Some great news from COP27 also has appeared

Ralph Chami, Associate Deputy Director International Monetary Fund click for his LinkedIn page

All was not for naught at the fantastic Oceanic Global meeting. Later in a session on ‘Blue Carbon’ Ralph Chami, an official of the IMF gave an inspiring presentation on how ocean restoration activities are so vital for this world. He said he would speak for ocean life in his presentation.

As a warm-up act for Ralph Chami, I offer this musical respite I have loved for so many years by the Australian aboriginal songstress Shellie Morris. She sings a great message of the Salt Water people.
Wali0waliyangu li-Anthawirriyarra a-Kurija – We sing for the salt water people! You don’t need to understand the language of the Borroloola song women to love this, it will reach your heart and soul, I promise!

Ralph presented the incredible value he and colleagues have calculated of the worth of a healthy living ocean full of life underpinned by ocean photosynthesis as it is measured in the Paris Treaty metric of being “Blue Carbon.”  Ralph Chami showed his mathematics that a single living great whale represents $3 million in Climate Mitigation action! The population of 1 million whales thus translates to $3 Trillion in value. Ralph pointed out those whales eat ocean plankton.

Copepods, the most nutritious food of the seas, used to number more than the stars in the universe – click to read more.

I later spoke with him about the importance of one of said plankton, the Copepods that are reported to have once been so numerous in our oceans that they outnumbered the stars in the universe. Their value is incalculable, and we have demonstrated how incredibly simple it is to immediately restore the ocean pastures they live in.

At the very root of ocean health is the tragedy that our oceans have seen 50%-90% of their ocean pasture grass, the phytoplankton, exterminated over the past 70 years. To support the great whales, the sea birds, the fish, the copepods, and all of ocean life we must, and we can restore the oceans to the historic condition of health and abundance. These vital Voyages of Recovery are now mustering ships and crews and will be setting sail to do just this early next year in five of the world’s seven seas!

Join us … Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. Sail away from safe harbour, catch the wind in your sails, explore dream discover!

Update: Qatar has spent more than $220 Billion on the World Cup event that begins next week in Doha. That the world can spend such a sum on a soccer match explains it all, we can afford sports or ocean life… it is clear which one loses.