The oceans have been suffering from a variety of escalating insults for decades: excessive and destructive fishing; loss of wetlands and other valuable habitat; pollution from industries, farms, and households; invasion of troublesome species of fish and aquatic plants, and other problems. In addition, climate and atmospheric changes, which many scientists link to the combustion of fossil fuels and other human activities, are melting sea ice, changing ocean pH, stressing corals, killing plankton that are vital to the marine food web, increasing coastal erosion, and threatening to disrupt Earth's temperatures in ways that will alter weather and deplete ocean life. The pervasiveness of these problems finally began to be recognized in the 1990s, symbolized by the United Nations' declaration of 1998 as the Year of the Oceans and the holding of a National Ocean Conference that same year in Monterey, California, with the presi dent and vice president in atten dance. Yet the severity of these problems remains generally un derappreciated, as reflected in the inadequate and increasingly out of-date policy responses of the U.S. and other governments.
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