Potential effects of climate changes on the marine ecosystem stability: assessment of the water quality

JORGE E. MARCOVECCHIO; BUZZI NATALIA; MATÍAS TÁRTARA; CARLA V.SPETTER; SIMONETTI PIA

Marine Ecology in a Changing World

Science Publishers/CRC Press/Taylor&Francis

Año: 2013; p. 1 - 50

1. INTRODUCTION A huge amount of carbon is being annually released into the Earth?s atmosphere, reaching levels of gigatonnes (Jongen et al. 2011; Zhang et al. 2012). These accumulative post-industrial emissions have caused different effects, including increasing global temperature, rising sea level, changes in regional weather patterns, acidification of oceans, variations in nutrient loads or alteration in ocean circulation (Brierley and Kingsford 2009). Both these changes and others that may be occurring affect biological processes taking place in the ocean at all levels, from the molecular to the ecosystemic one (Drinkwater et al. 2010). There is broad consensus that contemporary global climate change is a reality, and that much of the ongoing change is a direct result of human activity (IPCC 2007a). In particular, burning fossil fuels, making cement and changing land use have driven atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations up from a pre-industrial value of about 280 ppm to 385 ppm in 2008 (Meure et al. 2006) (Figure 1). Annual increases are now exceeding 2 ppm, an emission trend that exceeds the worst case scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2007b). There is a direct link between global temperature and CO2 concentration (IPCC 2007a). The increased heating in the .......