Its been nice knowing (almost) all of you. The tiny bits of plastic at the bottom of the ocean poisoning the food chain, and the floaty bits on top of it in the garbage patch choking the birds and dolphins ought to finish us all off in about 50 years or less.
If there was any sanity in the world, this story would be the top news story for the next few months at least, but alas, our human brains and politicians don’t work in sane ways. I mean, it’s pretty hard to top the story that indicates that life as we know it on the planet is doomed within 50 years thanks to our plastics pollution alone.
If you invested in BP about a year ago, you’ve made a tidy profit off their destruction of the Gulf and thousands of lost jobs, and at least 11 lives.
Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff 
This topic was brought up by my prof in the Bio of Algae class quite frequently.
That said, I think that we overestimate the fragility of the biosphere. Climate is always changing, climate itself being only an average assesment of conditions over a period of time, and species will evolve and go extinct with human input or without it.
The oceans could be severely damaged by acidification, as much of its first trophic level is sensitive to changes in pH. However, the large numbers of the afflicted species that survive will do so because they are tolerant of the changing conditions and reproduce so fast that they can evolve quickly. I am not so worried about the oceans as of yet as there exists species of archea that can exist and thrive in sulferic acid, an example of this extraordinary ability to change.
We need to be careful with what we do with the biosphere and it would be in a mutual human-biosphere interest to try and reduce our unnatural interference, but being alarmist and implicitly endorsing draconian remedies does nothing but discredit this position and in fact may impede any positive progress.
I agree with the poster above. One of the big difficulties in getting people properly appreciative of the dangers of global climate change is that they have heard it all before. The world’s been a-goin’ to end from this cause or that cause for a long time now. Most people are just numb and react to anything, plausible or implausible, with, “Yeah, whatever.” Perhaps the reason that I was able to clue into the dangerous potential of global climate change relatively early was that I’d never believed most of the other “end of world” scenarios (especially full-scale nuclear war…. what would be the profit in that?… follow the money).