Out in the world of nature, real puffins (and many other pelagic birds) were suffering badly from overfishing of the oceans and degradation of their nest sites, but nature could be a cold and abstract thing to love from the middle of New York City.
E-IPER students combine academic disciplines, including natural and earth sciences, engineering, economics, humanities, social sciences, law, health, policy, and business, to yield new insights and novel solutions to urgent global problems, such as energy use, climate change, food security, freshwater availability, depletion of ocean resources, land degradation, and biodiversity loss.
Human activity is driving negative changes in the global environment resulting in climate change, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification, soil degradation and pollution.
This seems broadly compatible with the authors' suggestion, and has the advantage of not requiring the origin of life in an ocean environment where degradation might prevail over syntheses.
"The situation is very different for the oceans," Dr. Knowlton and Dr. Jackson wrote, because degradation of ocean ecosystems is so pervasive, and underwater observation is relatively recent.
When the director Louie Psihoyos slipped into the little coastal town of Taiji, Japan, it was under cover of documenting the degradation of ocean reefs.
In addition to ocean noise, pollution, habitat degradation and other risk factors, she says, the two biggest threats to humpback whales today are becoming tangled in nets and getting hit by boats, concerns shared by other conservationists.
Here we use a three-dimensional (3-D) chemical transport model to investigate the impact on its predicted decay of uncertainties in the rates at which CCl4 is removed from the atmosphere by photolysis, by ocean uptake and by degradation in soils.
However, the past 30 years have seen increasing concerns about domestic overfishing, as well as habitat degradation and ocean pollution.
