We spend a lot of time around here campaigning to end to the annual Japanese whale slaughter and encouraging our members to get educated and take action. While our passion behind this lies mostly in protecting these fascinating creatures and their habitats, research shows that in addition to being a cruel and unnecessary practice, commercial whaling also releases millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere - an event that has a enormous impact on, you guessed it, global warming.

You see, each time a whale bids adieu to its life on Earth, it sinks to the bottom of the great blue sea, carrying with it tons of carbon that has been sucked out of our atmosphere and stored in their body for years to come. Similar to trees that filter CO2 from our air through photosynthesis, whales clear our oceans of these ozone depleting gases. You could say it's one of Mother Nature's way of cleaning house for us. Researchers are beginning to think that repopulating the oceans with whales could have a tremendous impact on our ecosystem.

"If you think about whales and fish in terms of their carbon, there is a potential for using carbon offset credits as an additional incentive for rebuilding this population," said Andrew Pershing of the University of Maine School of Marine Science and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute who presented his results yesterday at a meeting of ocean scientists convened by the American Geophysical Union in Portland, Ore.

According to Pershing, an estimated 105 million tons of carbon has been released over the past 100 years strictly due to whaling, a figure that he says is comparable to burning Oregon's forest or driving 128,000 Hummers for 100 years. Granted, 105 million tons is small potatoes compared to the 7 billion tons of carbon released annually worldwide, but as Pershing points out, the amount is akin to many of the current proposed strategies for battling climate change - reforestation projects or planting iron in the oceans to help phytoplankton absorb more CO2.

"Over the last 100 years, whaling removed more than 2 million whales from the Southern Hemisphere alone," said Phillip Clapham, director of the cetacean program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle. For many species, this represented 90-95 percent of their total numbers.

The demand for whale blubber is directly tied to the manufacturing of margarine, lamp or industrial oil, and of course - whale meat for human and animal consumption. Tasty.

Clapham notes that in addition to whales, larger fish like sharks and bluefin tuna also house a great deal of carbon.

"These guys are huge. They don't have predators. When they die they are very likely to sink and take their biomass to the bottom of the ocean."

When asked how he feels about Pershing's theory that redistributing whales could increase carbon consumption, Clapham says "It's a great idea. I love it...presuming that they are correct, it certainly is a very novel and innovative idea and another reason to save whales."

via Discovery