Ocean acidification scares the crap out of me, in a way that the rest of climate change doesn't.
Fact is, a lot of the rest of the chaos that is predicted from climate change is, on a long baseline, a more or less normal state of affairs.
So the oceans are going to rise, flooding out couple billion coastal residents over the next 50 years? Sucks for them, sure, but actually that's a slower rate of population-dislocation than we've seen over the last 50 years from rural-urban migrations. Shame about the sunk costs and lost nations and all that, but civilisation has lived through worse, and will go on.
So the rising and warming oceans are going to drown the great coral reef ecosystems? No problem -- every coral reef in the world was drowned by the great meltwater pulses at the end of the last Ice Age. They reconstituted themselves after a few thousand years. They can do that again.
So the ice-free north pole is going to kill the polar bears? Yeah, probably, most of them -- but there've been ice-free north poles many previous times in the Polar bears' 2.5-million-year evolutionary history. Evidence suggests that during the warmest part of interglacial periods, they hybridise with Grizzlies and then re-speciate when the climate cools down again. They can cope -- and even if they can't, losing an apex predator isn't the worst thing that can happen to an ecosystem.
Losing the base of the food chain, however, is.
My point is not that climate change isn't real, or that humans aren't causing it, or that the disruptions it will cause won't be horrible and tragic and painful and expensive -- my point is that both ecosystems and civilisations are complex adaptive systems which have already proven themselves to be reasonably robust against exactly these sort of disruptions.
Ocean acidification is different than sea level rise and global warming, however. With ocean acidification, we're making an excursion unlike anything the planet has seen in 300 million years. There's simply no precedent that allows us to say "yeah, it's gonna hurt, but the world has already shown that it can cope with this kind of thing". It hasn't. As far as we know, this level of OA could produce a full trophic collapse -- and that isn't something that even I can't be cavalier about, as it would certainly be a civilisation-limiting (and possibly complex-life-limiting) event. Until we know for certain that the impacts of OA will be less severe than this, we should be doing everything we can to stop and reverse it.
But I don't think we should only be scared by things that cause "full trophic collapse". We're looking at unprecedented environmental changes (in terms of speed) at about the same time the world population will be hitting 11 Billion people. Foreseeing how all the variables will interact is almost impossible.
Yes, the earth and life will go on. But it very well could be a horrible and scary place to live for us humans in the interim.
Gotta love a good "prominent negative excursion". Which is to say, gotta love unabashed scientific writing. "Neutral bouyancy" would be another good one. We need better basic science writing, even if it is on the quagmire that is wikipedia.
That's what a lot of these people don't get. At no time in our past has the Earth had to support more than a few hundred million humans. So exactly, welcome to the climate change holocaust. Except it won't be 6 million, more likely a billion. And the wars and the violence to go with it.
Climate zealots are ridiculous on both sides. Comments like yours, while popular, are the opposite of science. Do you want to get people on board to reduce pollution, then stop insulting their intelligence with juvenile nonsense. Listen to the scientists.
How is your comment any more mature. It borders on the line of religious zealotry with the status quo who don't know what they are doing. It's like yes we produce a bunch of garbage. Sure a lot of people might die, but at least we are professional about it. Yeah people like you take this stuff very seriously. You guys are all grown up. The elite, just like all elite, are the blind leading the blind. They don't know what the fuck they are doing, but are sure damn well sure in themselves.
11.3% of the world’s population is hungry. That’s roughly 805 million people who go undernourished on a daily basis, consuming less than the recommended 2,100 calories a day.
This has happened several times in earth's history, and caused many extinction events. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event
(Ironically most of our fossil fuel is the result of extinction events caused by the buildup of CO2.)
For an organism to "evolve to survive" a lot of individual organisms have to fail to survive. The evolution of slight-acid-tolerance in plankton will come at the loss of all the slightly-acid-intolerant plankton. That reduces diversity within species, and obviously wipes out entire species that don't have a self-sustainable subpopulation of acid-tolerant individuals from which to rebuild.
If this happens fast then the die-off will be larger. The loss of diversity also makes those populations less robust to other shocks (what if the acid tolerant individuals within a species also tend to really like cold water, and then oceans warm?).
Yes, we could see evolution happen, but one of the ways evolution acts is through mass extinctions.
However acidification is a slow process (compared to rate of plancton reproduction - of course Plankton is a generic term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankton and it varies by species)
"Since pre-industrial times, the pH of the oceans has dropped from an average of 8.2 to 8.1 today. Projections of climate change estimate that by the year 2100, this number will drop further, to around 7.8"
Neutral pH is 7, so we can say even the ocean is basic and still will continue to be for some time
Anyone familiar with seawater knows it is not acidic, nor anywhere close. Similarly, inland dry lakes (places like mono, great salt lake, salton etc) are not acidic. But the ph is not relevant to why they can't sustain life. Its a lot more complicated than that.
No, the water in the above examples will not sustain life if you put 'acid' in it to neutralize tested ph. The real core of the issue is the disolved mineral content of the water and how healty or not that is. That ph correlation is neither fundamental nor fully reliable. Its a gross oversimplification.
The fact specific exercise is: not {all acids} introduced into {all alkaline solutions} make for end-state simple (ie, potable) water. The result is often, water with residual mineral content. And often that is, in fact, quite toxic. EG,
Another definition of a basic salt would be a salt that contains amounts of both hydroxide and other anions. White lead is an example. It is basic lead carbonate, or lead carbonate hydroxide. These salts are insoluble and are obtained through precipitation reactions.
oh, life is badass and is doing this all the time. The opposite (nobody evolves to survive) will be very improbable.
In a similar past scenery all known species of Ammonitoidea vanished and dissapear, but some similar cephalopods just lose the external shell, growth a skin over the shell somehow or put the remains of the shell inside the body and its descendants are doing fine as octopus, squids and cuttlefish.
It will be a disaster for the humans that need clams, crustaceans and sea ursins to feed this families, and hundreds of marine species will not survive of course, but for a few species this will be a real blessing.
>So the rising and warming oceans are going to drown the great coral reef ecosystems? No problem -- every coral reef in the world was drowned by the great meltwater pulses at the end of the last Ice Age. They reconstituted themselves after a few thousand years. They can do that again.
NOAA says it takes 10k years at least [0], which is quite a long time, and that's assuming optimal conditions. Reefs are immediately threatened by ocean acidification, warming waters, biodiversity loss, and physical ecosystem destruction. In current conditions, all coral reefs will be in danger of extinction by 2050; 10% of world coral reefs have already died off. (and the damage due to bleaching and biodiversity loss at those which haven't yet is obvious and apparent to every person who has frequented them in the last 30 years)
I don't think anyone is particularly worried about humans ending the long time viability of life on Earth; we can't wipe out everything, and the Earth's ecosystems will recover over a period of time proportional to the size of the human caused disaster. It's sort of alarming that you present such a straw man argument, as if you're reading a science fiction novel, where it's all going to be okay because in a few million years, things will be back on track again, and you seem to be completely unconcerned with the immediate impacts and benefits of these ecosystems, completely detached from the reality at hand.
We're talking about real ecosystems and their incalculable impact (there are estimates of the economic importance of reefs, but it is the scientific and social impacts which are incalculable) on real people, alive today, living right now, that should be alarming and upsetting enough without considering long-term geological scale issues.
A second point.
>Fact is, a lot of the rest of the chaos that is predicted from climate change is, on a long baseline, a more or less normal state of affairs.
This statement is actually most inaccurate when it comes to the current rate of climate change. There are multiple studies, and levels of evidence, at multiple geological time scales, which show that the current and predicted rates of warming are unprecedented throughout geological time. The current rate of warming is faster now than at any time in the last 11,000 years [1], and it may occur faster than any climate change which has occurred in the last 65 million years [2], current rates of warming are substantially faster than that at the end of an ice age [3], and CO2 levels are currently higher than at any point within the last 800,000 years [4].
It is important to understand that these issues will have real impacts on real people in the immediate future, and being optimistic on the scale of geological time is absurdly detached from a day to day reality.
Climate change, biodiversity loss, and ocean acidification will have serious impact on the immediate time scale, and are largely unprecedented in the geological time scale.
Upvoted for the thoughtfulness and references! That said:
> We're talking about real ecosystems and their incalculable impact (there are estimates of the economic importance of reefs, but it is the scientific and social impacts which are incalculable) on real people, alive today, living right now, that should be alarming and upsetting enough without considering long-term geological scale issues.
My point isn't that people shouldn't be upset. My point is that it's important to spend one's upset wisely, not to exhaust it on things which don't matter as much.
And frankly, considering evolutionary timescales doesn't automatically make everything better -- it just puts things in perspective. Yes, a world without Polar Bears would be a worse world. But considering the bigger picture, we're already living in a worse world. I'm already pissed off about what we did to all the other hominids, and the Mammoths, and the Woolly Rhinoceroses, and the Glyptodonts, and the Sabre-Toothed Cats, and the giant Sloths, and the giant Lemurs, and the Aurochs, and the Elephant Birds, and the Sea Cows, etc. etc. etc... The world was once a more wondrous place, and we butchered it. Adding Polar Bears to that list will absolutely upset me further -- but, as the record shows, like it or not, life will go on.
I don't say this to be cavalier. I say this because it's important to be able to distinguish "life will go on" scenarios from "life won't go on" scenarios. Those are also something we can see in the geological record, and are worth taking very damn seriously. If we lose Polar Bears (or coral reefs, or other charismatic indicators which people tend to focus on), life will go on. If we lose plankton, it won't. If we focus our upset and our policy-making on the former -- at the expense of the latter -- then we're potentially in very serious trouble.
>> Fact is, a lot of the rest of the chaos that is predicted from climate change is, on a long baseline, a more or less normal state of affairs.
> This statement is actually most inaccurate when it comes to the current rate of climate change. There are multiple studies, and levels of evidence, at multiple geological time scales, which show that the current and predicted rates of warming are unprecedented throughout geological time. The current rate of warming is faster now than at any time in the last 11,000 years [1],
True, but this is cherry-picking the data. Extend that window to 15,000 years, and it is no longer even close to true.
> and it may occur faster than any climate change which has occurred in the last 65 million years [2],
Yeah... um, sorry, that's a load of bunk. First of all, they're not talking about what's happening today, they're talking about the worst-case end-of-century 6c models, which rely on scenarios in which population growth doesn't slow down and solar panels don't get cheap. Even considering this, saying that this will be "10x worse than any climate change of the past 65 million years" would require being pretty wildly ignorant of what's happened in the past 65 million years. During Meltwater Pulse 1A (14.6k years ago), sea levels were rising at 50-100cm per decade. Not even the worst-case 6c models predict anything like that. And during the Zanclean flood (5.33M years ago), sea levels were falling at 50-100cm per month (unless you were in the Mediterranean, in which case they were rising at 20-40cm per hour). So, really: we're heading towards a climate event which is 10x more dramatic than that? My ass. Absolute ignorant rubbish.
> current rates of warming are substantially faster than that at the end of an ice age [3], and CO2 levels are currently higher than at any point within the last 800,000 years [4].
Yeah, and that last point is something to be genuinely worried about. As is the fact that we're on track to take C02 on a multi-million-year excursion, at least. We're taking the climate outside the envelope in which our species evolved... and, yes, that should be very disconcerting. We certainly should stop doing that. But whatever we do, we should absolutely make sure that we don't lose the plankton. That's got to be a higher priority than pretty much anything else.
This why I find the consideration of deep-historical and evolutionary and geological timescales useful: not to tell us that we shouldn't be worried, but to better inform us as to what, exactly, we should be worried about. What they tell us is that, on a timescale of decades, the large-scale migration and resettlement of human populations is not only survivable, but thrivable. It will be profoundly disconcerting to many people, but we did it once in the 20th century, and can do it again. It is not an existential threat to civilisation, the way it is often portrayed. Similarly, the consideration of deep time tells us that the loss of apex species and the fragmentation of ecosystems due to a rapidly-changing environment is, again, bloody disconcerting, but not an existential threat to our planet.
So we should take all of the above issues seriously, but not more seriously than something which is an existential threat to civilisation and the planet. Ocean Acidification is potentially such a threat. A future in which we save the Polar bears, save the coral reefs, save the coastal cities -- and lose the plankton -- is no future at all. That's game over for absolutely everyone. Our priorities should reflect this fact.
Thanks for the time for making a thoughtful response. I don't think we disagree on too much here, and I see your point - but the thing to remember is that, for some people in your "life will go on" scenario, life will in fact not go on if the habitats they rely on for survival are destroyed, even if to you and I those ecosystems are merely an enormous benefit, not a necessity. I think that this impact is morally appalling enough to act upon.
And finally, my point about climate change being unparalleled in 60 million years was restricted to global warming, you're right that catastrophic events have occurred during this period, but the sort of greenhouse gas induced, rapid global acceleration in temperatures has likely not been seen since the KT event.
No, because you're a large adult organism. But if you were a tiny crustacean, you wouldn't be able to grow a shell. This affects tiny crustaceans, but also the young of large species such as king crabs.
The aquarium in Boston has a hands-on demo for kids about acidification impacting the ability of some creatures to grow their shell. Didn't see anyone else but my son and I trying it though. Hopefully the message gets through to more people, but I think too many people fail to see how it could impact them.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it would seem like Ocean Acidification would be less prone to "Climate Commitment" than regular climate change. Meaning, if we just stopped emitting greenhouse gases, OA would stop increasing. The rest of Climate change would still keep continuing for a few decades.
I don't think this is known. If all CO2 emissions stop and atmospheric levels are 450ppm but the ocean and atmosphere are at equilibrium at 350ppm then OA will continue to increase. Further, once equilibrium is achieved it is unknown how long it would take for OA to reverse.
I think OA is probably one of the scariest consequences of excessive CO2.
We've already crossed a couple of thresholds. Oyster farming in the Puget Sound, for example, now often involves moving the larvae to Hawaii so they can form their hard shell in a higher PH environment before moving them back.
Well, it turns out there's an extremely cheap solution to this that can sequester another 1/3rd of our carbon while making lots of plankton and restocking the oceans with fish.
I'm really glad to see this. I don't know for sure that iron fertilization will turn out to be a good idea, but the opposition to experimenting with it baffles me. It's like people think that we can choose whether or not to engage in geoengineering. No, we can't: we're already doing it (as indeed the article points out). If we can find new interventions that counteract the effects of our existing interventions, that would be a wonderful thing.
I think we should be experimenting with both iron fertilization (to sequester carbon and combat ocean acidification) and sulfur aerosols (for cooling). Both of these mimic natural events such as volcanic eruptions; they're not unprecedented in nature.
I heartily welcome the opportunity to troll the chemtrail people when we do begin geoengineering experiments at scale, in earnest. I know there's going to be a conspiracy-theory movement around anything we do to save our planet.
This is fascinating -- I wanted to ask if anyone knew of any geoengineering ideas to deal with rising ocean temperatures and acidity
EDIT: The article mentions that "there are also concerns that trapping CO2 at the bottom of the ocean may increase ocean acidification" so I'm not sure if this particular approach is really a solution?
To the few commenters on this page offering a somewhat contrarian view, what's your beef? Is it reactive skepticism, or being contrarian for the sake of it, or having a vested interest in the status quo?
Coming as it does on the heels of yesterday's sea level warning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927099 this makes me wonder what it takes to take a large chunk of water, maintain a traditional pH, cleanliness and temperature, and grow stuff (fish, algae, seaweed). It seems this is going to be an area with increasing demand, even just betting on the growing population. Anyone interested in doing an aquaculture startup? I have had some ideas in the area (I think fundamentally different to others) already.
> “If you went to Boston Harbor and pulled up a cup of water and looked under a microscope, you’d see very different species later on,” Dutkiewicz says. “By 2100, you’d see ones that were living maybe closer to North Carolina now, up near Boston.”
I hope marine communities are that adaptable. What if the species in North Carolina aren't able to move up to Boston Harbor and they all just die?
Does anyone know if there is additional information on the precision of the measurements? Is the ocean ph going from 8.16 (8.2) to 8.14 (8.1) in this article or is it more dramatic than that? I wasn't able to access the full study because of the pay-wall.
"Acidification" is a purposely alarmist term. (ie. oceans are turning to acid).
The pH is slightly moving towards neutral from an alkaline base.
I wonder if the continued use of this term by the "climate change industry" is to relay accurate scientific information or just to help increase their funding?
I can tell you from keeping a coral reef tank, that a "slight move towards neutral" from 8.1 to 7.8 means stuff starts to die. At pH at or below 7.8, coral cannot generate it's carbonate skeleton, and lots of other organisms are affected. In fact I personally have a CO2 scrubber connected to my reef tank in order to combat the high levels of CO2 from inside the house.
As other posters have pointed out, pH is logarithmic. A 0.1 drop from ph 8.2 to 8.1 corresponds to something like a 30% increase in hydrogen ion concentration.
If your blood where to drop by 0.1 pH you'd start having seizures. (it's called Acidosis, and that's a medical term, not an alarmist term) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acidosis
Acidification is not "purposely alarmist", it is the accurate scientific description of what is happening. pH is logarithmic, so "slightly moving towards neutral" is actually a huge relative change.
If anything, the "climate change industry" as you put it are doing a piss poor job of attracting attention to something very scary.
The pH is moving towards the acid end of the spectrum, no matter what's the current position - hence acid-ification. It's a scientific term, just open a chemistry book and read about pH.
Similarly, we say the spectrum of light undergoes a "red shift" even when there's no red in it. But I'm guessing that's also an alarmist term from the black-and-white TV industry, right? /s
> The pH is slightly moving towards neutral from an alkaline base.
... which would be disastrous for a huge chunk of the ocean's ecosystem. "Acidification" seems entirely appropriate; what's the alternative you'd propose?
From your link: "The trigger for these mass extinctions appears to be a warming of the ocean caused by a rise of carbon dioxide levels to about 1000 parts per million."
That is fucking miles away. At the other end, C3 plant life goes extinct if CO2 falls below 250ppm or so? So why don't you alarmists get your knickers in a twist about that "tipping point"?? If we hadn't dug up and put some fossilized carbon back into the carbon cycle (where it bloody well came from in the first place) then we'd be facing that extinction scenario instead.
>There's little risk of CO2 shortage. Every animal on the planet exhales it.
Erm no. Exhaling it is just part of the carbon cycle, it doesn't make the net level in circulation go up or down, it isn't a sink or a source... the carbon you breathe out doesn't get magicked out of thin air. It comes from the sugars, fats and protein you eat which is then burnt by your body for energy, exhaled, photosynthesized by plants, consumed by animals, and moves on up the food chain where you eat it and we start again. Round and round. That's why they call it a cycle.
Without our intervention the net amount of carbon in the cycle would continue to fall due to weathering of rocks and sequestration beneath the Earth, eventually leading to the extinction of all trees and most (non C4) plant life. Luckily, we're digging it up to restore the carbon cycle to its former glory. I think about 800ppm should be our target.
Producing CO2 is an exothermic process, and therefore easy - just set stuff on fire and it keeps going on its own. Removing CO2 is an endothermic ("energy-intensive") process, and therefore hard; moreover, a lot of our energy-making just makes more CO2, thereby stumping any CO2 removal attempt.
In other words, low CO2 is uphill from where we are, whereas high CO2 is downhill. And the slope is steep due to the laws of thermodynamics and chemistry.
Not the OP but I found it interesting, and a significant piece of information when considering possible environments of the future.
I have doubt that they are going to get close to actually predicting the future environment with most of their models, since like with the temperature models they are trying to find and extrapolate seemingly-linear relationships in a very complex non-linear system, and that doesn't usually work as well as you'd like it to.
Also the subtext in the press release seems to indicate that this research will immediately be used as a political bludgeon, which I'm never a fan of. It's a shame and it reminds me of this classic cartoon: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
"...the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."
Fact is, a lot of the rest of the chaos that is predicted from climate change is, on a long baseline, a more or less normal state of affairs.
So the oceans are going to rise, flooding out couple billion coastal residents over the next 50 years? Sucks for them, sure, but actually that's a slower rate of population-dislocation than we've seen over the last 50 years from rural-urban migrations. Shame about the sunk costs and lost nations and all that, but civilisation has lived through worse, and will go on.
So the rising and warming oceans are going to drown the great coral reef ecosystems? No problem -- every coral reef in the world was drowned by the great meltwater pulses at the end of the last Ice Age. They reconstituted themselves after a few thousand years. They can do that again.
So the ice-free north pole is going to kill the polar bears? Yeah, probably, most of them -- but there've been ice-free north poles many previous times in the Polar bears' 2.5-million-year evolutionary history. Evidence suggests that during the warmest part of interglacial periods, they hybridise with Grizzlies and then re-speciate when the climate cools down again. They can cope -- and even if they can't, losing an apex predator isn't the worst thing that can happen to an ecosystem.
Losing the base of the food chain, however, is.
My point is not that climate change isn't real, or that humans aren't causing it, or that the disruptions it will cause won't be horrible and tragic and painful and expensive -- my point is that both ecosystems and civilisations are complex adaptive systems which have already proven themselves to be reasonably robust against exactly these sort of disruptions.
Ocean acidification is different than sea level rise and global warming, however. With ocean acidification, we're making an excursion unlike anything the planet has seen in 300 million years. There's simply no precedent that allows us to say "yeah, it's gonna hurt, but the world has already shown that it can cope with this kind of thing". It hasn't. As far as we know, this level of OA could produce a full trophic collapse -- and that isn't something that even I can't be cavalier about, as it would certainly be a civilisation-limiting (and possibly complex-life-limiting) event. Until we know for certain that the impacts of OA will be less severe than this, we should be doing everything we can to stop and reverse it.