California Against the Sea Quotes

“Resilience includes knowing when an unwanted transformation is inevitable.”
― Rosanna Xia, California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline

“In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”
― Rosanna Xia, California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline

“The ocean, indeed, has long been the silent hero in this burning world. It has absorbed almost one-third of the carbon dioxide released by humans since the Industrial Revolution and more than 90 percent of the resulting heat---helping the air we breathe at the expense of a souring sea. Warm water, put simply, expands, whereas cold water takes up less space. And when carbon dioxide mixes with seawater, it undergoes chemical reactions that increase the water's acidity. It we treat Earth as our most ailing patient, the symptoms are right here in the water. Across the seven seas, coral reefs are dying, oysters and clams are struggling to build their shells. Gray whales, sentinels of the Pacific as they migrate 12,000 miles each year from the Arctic to Baja California, have washed up dead in staggering numbers. A special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that marine heatwaves---extreme periods of broiling water that disrupt entire ecosystems--have doubled in frequency since 1982. In just one year, the world's oceans got hotter by about 14 zettajoules (one zettajoule is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy). This is a mind-bending number, so one thermal scientist put it this way: "The oceans have absorbed heat equivalent to seven Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating each second, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year.”
― Rosanna Xia, California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline