Archive for the ‘Ocean Acidification’ Category

Ocean Acidification from CO2 Is Happening Faster Than Thought

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

A lesser-known consequence of having a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air is the acidification of water. Oceans naturally absorb the greenhouse gas; in fact, they take in roughly one third of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by human activities. When CO2 dissolves in water, it forms carbonic acid, the same substance found in carbonated beverages. New research now suggests that seawater might be growing acidic more quickly than climate change models have predicted.

Marine ecologist J. Timothy Wootton of the University of Chicago and his colleagues spent eight years compiling measurements of acidity, salinity, temperature and other data from Tatoosh Island off the northwestern tip of Washington State. They found that the average acidity rose more than 10 times faster than predicted by climate simulations.

Highly acidic water can wreak havoc on marine life. For instance, it can dissolve the calcium carbonate in seashells and coral reefs [see “The Dangers of Ocean Acidification,” by Scott C. Doney; Scientific American, March 2006]. In their study, published in the December 2 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Wootton and his team discovered that the balance of ecosystems shifted: populations of large-shelled animals such as mussels and stalked barnacles dropped, whereas smaller-shelled species and noncalcareous algae (species that lack calcium-based skeletons) became more abundant. “I see it as a harbinger of the trends we might expect to occur in the future,” says oceanographer Scott C. Doney of the Woods Hole Ocean­ographic Institution, who did not participate in this study.

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The fight to get aboard Lifeboat UK

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

– James Lovelock, again, tells it like it is.  What he says here is what I’ve felt for a long time without being able to articulate it nearly so well as he has.  Indeed, it is why I’ve secured the right of permanent residency in New Zealand; as a hedge against the future he’s painting.

– I see people drawing word pictures of the world around us at all levels.   The local and the mundane, the national and the global.   But most of their pictures are fragments at best; partial renderings of realities far more complex and dark than they’ve drawn or imagined.

– Lovelock paints the canvas behind all their canvases.   They are, perhaps, the projected moving pictures on the screen.  Whereas, his is the screen upon which theirs cavort.  In rings speak, ‘One vision to rule them all’.

– There are big changes, nearly unimaginably big changes, coming.   And most of us, if we are not in denial, are engaged in building sandcastles in a losing battle to stem the sea.   His analogies about 1939 are so apt.   And time is getting so late.

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Last week she played in the snow, but what will Britain be like when she grows up? James Lovelock, the Earth guru, foresees a land where blizzards are long forgotten and national survival depends on a new Winston Churchill

When someone discovers, too late, that they are suffering from a serious and probably incurable disease and may have no more than six months to live, their first response is shock and then, in denial, they angrily try any cure on offer or go to practitioners of alternative medicine. Finally, if wise, they reach a state of calm acceptance. They know death need not be feared and that no one escapes it.

Scientists who recognise the truth about the Earth’s condition advise their governments of its deadly seriousness in the manner of a physician. We are now seeing the responses. First was denial at all levels, then the desperate search for a cure. Just as we as individuals try alternative medicine, so our governments have many offers from alternative business and their lobbies of sustainable ways to “save the planet”, and from some green hospice there may come the anodyne of hope.

Should you doubt that this grim prospect is real, let me remind you of the forces now taking the Earth to the hothouse: these include the increasing abundance of greenhouse gases from industry and agriculture, including gases from natural ecosystems damaged by global heating in the Arctic and the tropics. The vast ocean ecosystems that used to pump down carbon dioxide can no longer do so because the ocean turns to desert as it warms and grows more acidic; then there is the extra absorption of the sun’s radiant heat as white reflecting snow melts and is replaced by dark ground or ocean.

Each separate increase adds heat and together they amplify the warming that we cause. The power of this combination and the inability of the Earth now to resist it is what forces me to see the efforts made to stabilise carbon dioxide and temperature as no better than planetary alternative medicine.

Do not be misled by lulls in climate change when global temperature is constant for a few years or even, as we have seen in the UK in the past week, appears to drop and people ask: where is global warming now?

However unlikely it sometimes seems, change really is happening and the Earth grows warmer year by year. But do not expect the climate to follow the smooth path of slowly but sedately rising temperatures predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where change slowly inches up and leaves plenty of time for business as usual. The real Earth changes by fits and starts, with spells of constancy, even slight decline, between the jumps to greater heat. It is ever more at risk of changing to a barren state in which few of us can survive.

The high-sounding and well-meaning visions of the European Union of “saving the planet” and developing sustainably by using only “natural” energy might have worked in 1800 when there were only a billion of us, but now they are a wholly impractical luxury we can ill afford.

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– research thanks, again, to Robin S.

Thinking about a thousand-year depression

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

– An excellent piece from The Automatic Earth; a Blog I’ve just started following.

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Cyclical terms like “recession” and “depression” are looking less appropriate by the day. It’s like calling the period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance a “depression”.

I know the our situation is vastly different from the state of the world in Roman times, but the idea that we could be on the brink of a fundamental reset of civilization is intriguing, to say the least.

I’ve been convinced for several years that we are looking at the convergence of a set of wicked interlocking global problems — ecological problems (climate chaos, the death of the oceans, fresh water shortages etc.), energy shortages due to fossil fuel depletion, and overpopulation with the resulting pressure on the global food supply. This convergence is happening under the umbrella of the current global financial collapse that constrains our ability to respond to any of these problems individually, let alone any further problems that might emerge from interactions between them.

This unfortunate collision makes the future of our civilization very murky indeed. Writers like James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer, Carolyn Baker and Sharon Astyk (along with people like Stoneleigh and Ilargi at The Automatic Earth) have been warning about the possibility of a generalized, unrecoverable collapse of modern civilization for a while now. They have generally been derided by the mainstream as millennialist prophets of doom — driven more by their own subconscious fears and dark desires, their research full of confirmation bias.

The events unfolding around us now, however, cast their optimistic mainstream critics in a somewhat different light. None of them — even the Roubinis and Krugmans – have fully appreciated the severity of the world’s financial predicament. Their comforting bromides (and even their more pessimistic utterances) have been overwhelmed by events on a weekly basis. It has become clear that for all their careful analysis of trunks and tails, nobody truly understood the shape of the entire elephant.

This evident failure of comprehension brings their entire analysis into disrepute. And that should make us ask – if they failed to comprehend the underpinnings of a calamity in their own domain, what does that say about the possibility that they also failed to understand the dangers being trumpeted by the doomers they have derided?

After all, we are seeing the same outcome in the climate crisis as in the financial one – the trends are uniformly negative, and are unfolding much faster than the professionals in either field predicted. There are new signs from world bodies like the International Energy Agency that the same situation is developing with respect to the world’s oil supply – the more pessimistic members of the Peak Oil crowd appear to be heading for vindication.

So, following a “major, rapid contraction” (aka collapse), could our civilization end up staying on the mat, unable to rise from the ashes of our former glory? That’s unknowable of course, but hardly inconceivable. Several factors give that speculation some foundation.

The first confounding factor is the spectre of irreversible climate change. That could irreparably damage the world’s food production capacity through shifts in rainfall and the reduction of snow and glacial cover that supplies much of the world’s fresh water for agriculture.

The second factor is the permanent depletion of the compact, high-density, transportable energy supply represented by fossil fuels. We’re putting a lot of effort into developing electrical alternatives, of course. There are two major challenges in the way, though. The first is the relative infancy of the industry, and the fact that it will require both capital and fossil fuels to enable its continued growth. The second longer term problem is that the use of electricity requires a higher level of technology in the infrastructure needed to manufacture, distribute, store and convert it into work. This may not seem like much of a a problem today, but if our global industrial civilization goes into a decline, growing parts of the world may find the maintenance of such infrastructure increasingly difficult.

A third factor that may get in the way of recovery is the depletion of easily-recoverable resources such as metals. The decline in the average quality of various ores being mined today is well documented, and is likely to continue. While recycling can recover much of the metal currently discarded as waste, recycling facilities capable of producing enough output to feed our civilization’s needs do not yet exist. They would face the same hurdles as the build-out of electrical supplies I described above.

You might think that such a situation will take so long to develop that we will be able to address the situation before it gets quite that dire.

One consideration that works against that hope is that human beings are not, for all their cleverness, fully rational creatures. Research has shown that most of our “rational” decisions are made at a deeply unconscious level, to be dressed up with rational justifications only upon their emergence into the conscious mind some time later. The truth of this proposition can be seen all around us in the competition between environmental remediation and economic imperatives, in the obstruction of alternative energy development, in our repeated creation of financial bubbles — in all the myriad ways in which we as a society work tirelessly against our own best interests as individuals and as a species.

Even worse, events have recently shown a terrifying ability to outstrip our expectations, in both speed and severity. We may not have nearly as much time left as we think. A lack of time coupled with an inability to respond rationally (or even to accept the evidence of our eyes) does not bode well for the future of this civilization.

It’s conceivable that our current civilization will never regain its feet after this storm has burst upon us. We will endure as a species no matter what happens, of course, and it’s even probable that we will rise to new heights. It’s also quite possible that the rebirth of this Phoenix will take a long, long time and that those new heights will be unrecognizable to someone raised in today’s world of 401(k)’s, Credit Default Swaps, automobiles and gigantic concrete cities.

– To the original:

– Research thanks to Kael for this.

Acid Oceans Threatening Marine Food Chain, Experts Warn

Friday, February 23rd, 2007

The world’s oceans are turning acidic due to the buildup of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, and scientists say the effects on marine life will be catastrophic.

In the next 50 to 100 years corrosive seawater will dissolve the shells of tiny marine snails and reduce coral reefs to rubble, the researchers say (coral photos, facts, more).

Four leading marine experts delivered this grim prognosis yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco, California.

The scientists stressed that increased ocean acidity is one of the gravest dangers posed by the buildup of atmospheric CO2.

“Ocean chemistry is changing to a state that has not occurred for hundreds of thousands of years,” said Richard Feely of Seattle’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.

“Shell-building by marine organisms will slow down or stop. Reef-building will decrease or reverse.”

Already, Feely said, ocean acidity has increased about 30 percent since industrialization began spurring harmful carbon emissions centuries ago. Unless emissions are reduced from current levels, an increase of 150 percent is predicted by 2100.

Such an increase would make the oceans more acidic than they’ve been at any time in the last 20 million years, he added.

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THE DARKENING SEA

Sunday, December 3rd, 2006

– This is a long article and you may not be sure you want to read  after just reading the teaser section I’ve provided. If you are not sure, go to the end and you’ll find a few quotes from deeper within the article that may pique your interest.

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by ELIZABETH KOLBERT in The New Yorker magazine
What carbon emissions are doing to the ocean

Pteropods are tiny marine organisms that belong to the very broad class known as zooplankton. Related to snails, they swim by means of a pair of winglike gelatinous flaps and feed by entrapping even tinier marine creatures in a bubble of mucus. Many pteropod species—there are nearly a hundred in all—produce shells, apparently for protection; some of their predators, meanwhile, have evolved specialized tentacles that they employ much as diners use forks to spear escargot. Pteropods are first male, but as they grow older they become female.

Victoria Fabry, an oceanographer at California State University at San Marcos, is one of the world’s leading experts on pteropods. She is slight and soft-spoken, with wavy black hair and blue-green eyes. Fabry fell in love with the ocean as a teen-ager after visiting the Outer Banks, off North Carolina, and took up pteropods when she was in graduate school, in the early nineteen-eighties. At that point, most basic questions about the animals had yet to be answered, and, for her dissertation, Fabry decided to study their shell growth. Her plan was to raise pteropods in tanks, but she ran into trouble immediately. When disturbed, pteropods tend not to produce the mucus bubbles, and slowly starve. Fabry tried using bigger tanks for her pteropods, but the only correlation, she recalled recently, was that the more time she spent improving the tanks “the quicker they died.” After a while, she resigned herself to constantly collecting new specimens. This, in turn, meant going out on just about any research ship that would have her.

Fabry developed a simple, if brutal, protocol that could be completed at sea. She would catch some pteropods, either by trawling with a net or by scuba diving, and place them in one-litre bottles filled with seawater, to which she had added a small amount of radioactive calcium 45. Forty-eight hours later, she would remove the pteropods from the bottles, dunk them in warm ethanol, and pull their bodies out with a pair of tweezers. Back on land, she would measure how much calcium 45 their shells had taken up during their two days of captivity.

In the summer of 1985, Fabry got a berth on a research vessel sailing from Honolulu to Kodiak Island. Late in the trip, near a spot in the Gulf of Alaska known as Station Papa, she came upon a profusion of Clio pyramidata, a half-inch-long pteropod with a shell the shape of an unfurled umbrella. In her enthusiasm, Fabry collected too many specimens; instead of putting two or three in a bottle, she had to cram in a dozen. The next day, she noticed that something had gone wrong. “Normally, their shells are transparent,” she said. “They look like little gems, little jewels. They’re just beautiful. But I could see that, along the edge, they were becoming opaque, chalky.”

Like other animals, pteropods take in oxygen and give off carbon dioxide as a waste product. In the open sea, the CO2 they produce has no effect. Seal them in a small container, however, and the CO2 starts to build up, changing the water’s chemistry. By overcrowding her Cliopyramidata, Fabry had demonstrated that the organisms were highly sensitive to such changes. Instead of growing, their shells were dissolving. It stood to reason that other kinds of pteropods—and, indeed, perhaps any number of shell-building species—were similarly vulnerable. This should have represented a major discovery, and a cause for alarm. But, as is so often the case with inadvertent breakthroughs, it went unremarked upon. No one on the boat, including Fabry, appreciated what the pteropods were telling them, because no one, at that point, could imagine the chemistry of an entire ocean changing.

Since the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned enough coal, oil, and natural gas to produce some two hundred and fifty billion metric tons of carbon. The result, as is well known, has been a transformation of the earth’s atmosphere. The concentration of CO2 in the air today—three hundred and eighty parts per million—is higher than it has been at any point in the past six hundred and fifty thousand years, and probably much longer. At the current rate of emissions growth, CO2 concentration will top five hundred parts per million—roughly double pre-industrial levels—by the middle of this century. It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual global temperature rise of between three and a half and seven degrees Fahrenheit, and that this, in turn, will prompt a string of disasters, including fiercer hurricanes, more deadly droughts, the disappearance of most remaining glaciers, the melting of the Arctic ice cap, and the inundation of many of the world’s major coastal cities. But this is only half the story.

Ocean covers seventy per cent of the earth’s surface, and everywhere that water and air come into contact there is an exchange. Gases from the atmosphere get absorbed by the ocean and gases dissolved in the water are released into the atmosphere. When the two are in equilibrium, roughly the same quantities are being dissolved as are getting released. But change the composition of the atmosphere, as we have done, and the exchange becomes lopsided: more CO2 from the air enters the water than comes back out. In the nineteen-nineties, researchers from seven countries conducted nearly a hundred cruises, and collected more than seventy thousand seawater samples from different depths and locations. The analysis of these samples, which was completed in 2004, showed that nearly half of all the carbon dioxide that humans have emitted since the start of the nineteenth century has been absorbed by the sea.

When CO2 dissolves, it produces carbonic acid, which has the chemical formula H2CO3. As acids go, H2CO3 is relatively innocuous—we drink it all the time in Coke and other carbonated beverages—but in sufficient quantities it can change the water’s pH. Already, humans have pumped enough carbon into the oceans—some hundred and twenty billion tons—to produce a .1 decline in surface pH. Since pH, like the Richter scale, is a logarithmic measure, a .1 drop represents a rise in acidity of about thirty per cent. The process is generally referred to as “ocean acidification,” though it might more accurately be described as a decline in ocean alkalinity. This year alone, the seas will absorb an additional two billion tons of carbon, and next year it is expected that they will absorb another two billion tons. Every day, every American, in effect, adds forty pounds of carbon dioxide to the oceans.

Because of the slow pace of deep-ocean circulation and the long life of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it is impossible to reverse the acidification that has already taken place. Nor is it possible to prevent still more from occurring. Even if there were some way to halt the emission of CO2 tomorrow, the oceans would continue to take up carbon until they reached a new equilibrium with the air. As Britain’s Royal Society noted in a recent report, it will take “tens of thousands of years for ocean chemistry to return to a condition similar to that occurring at pre-industrial times.”

Humans have, in this way, set in motion change on a geologic scale. The question that remains is how marine life will respond. Though oceanographers are just beginning to address the question, their discoveries, at this early stage, are disturbing.

The complete article is here:

Research thx to LA

Here are a few of LA’s comments on the article:

A recent New Yorker has an article by Elizabeth Kolbert on the
effects of carbon in the oceans. By now we could probably recite the consequences of carbon-loading the atmosphere, but I had never once heard or thought about how it might be affecting the sea. But “nearly half of all the carbon dioxide that humans have emitted since the start of the nineteenth century has been absorbed by the sea.”

This might initially seem like GOOD news. Think what shape the
atmosphere would be in had the oceans not absorbed half the carbon we’ve output! However, the aquatic carbon-loading is far from benign. The main consequence is a change in pH levels. The oceans are alkaline, and the carbon absorption makes them less alkaline, so it’s convenient shorthand (though not strictly accurate) to talk about “ocean acidification.” Research indicates that the changing pH of the oceans will have the following effects:

– Making it more difficult (and at some point impossible) for shellfish to form shells.

– Preventing the growth of coral and endangering the millions of species that depend on coral for habitat

– Killing some kinds of phytoplankton

Apocalypse Now: How Mankind is Sleepwalking to the End of the Earth

Saturday, October 21st, 2006

– This is a particularly good article and I highly recommend reading it. Â It may be more that a year old but its information is, if anything, even more topical than ever.

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Floods, storms and droughts. Melting Arctic ice, shrinking glaciers, oceans turning to acid. The world’s top scientists warned last week that dangerous climate change is taking place today, not the day after tomorrow. You don’t believe it? Then, says Geoffrey Lean, read this…

(Originally published on February 6th, 2005)

Last week, 200 of the world’s leading climate scientists – meeting at Tony Blair’s request at the Met Office’s new headquarters at Exeter – issued the most urgent warning to date that dangerous climate change is taking place, and that time is running out.

Next week the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty that tries to control global warming, comes into force after a seven-year delay. But it is clear that the protocol does not go nearly far enough.

The alarms have been going off since the beginning of one of the warmest Januaries on record. First, Dr Rajendra Pachauri – chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – told a UN conference in Mauritius that the pollution which causes global warming has reached “dangerous” levels.

Then the biggest-ever study of climate change, based at Oxford University, reported that it could prove to be twice as catastrophic as the IPCC’s worst predictions. And an international task force – also reporting to Tony Blair, and co-chaired by his close ally, Stephen Byers – concluded that we could reach “the point of no return” in a decade.

Finally, the UK head of Shell, Lord Oxburgh, took time out – just before his company reported record profits mainly achieved by selling oil, one of the main causes of the problem – to warn that unless governments take urgent action there “will be a disaster”.

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research credit to MD – thx