
Ocean acidification may cause dramatic changes to phytoplankton - user_235711
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/ocean-acidification-phytoplankton-0720
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nkoren
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.

~~~
raverbashing
I think we're going to learn something about evolution

But I really expect that simple organisms (like, you know, plankton) will
evolve to survive

I don't think a small change in ph is as hard for evolution as dealing with
the already high amount of salt in oceans

The Zebra mussels are probably going to survive as well

~~~
moultano
This has happened several times in earth's history, and caused many extinction
events.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event](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.)

~~~
x5n1
So you're saying we'll have another oil boom in a few million years? Great.
Let me get ready by buying stock.

~~~
abalashov
Are you sure you don't stand to make more money from its increasing scarcity
and low EROEI rather than circumstances of plentiful supply? :)

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chris_va
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.

~~~
rhodysurf
Agreed, and its especially scary because it isn't a consequence laypeople are
typically familiar with and thus ignore.

~~~
tosseraccount
What can we do to educate folks about the ecological threat to large
commercial oceanic shell fish farming?

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fleitz
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.

[http://planetsave.com/2014/07/02/ocean-fertilization-
dangero...](http://planetsave.com/2014/07/02/ocean-fertilization-dangerous-
experiment-gone-right/)

~~~
eastbayjake
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?

~~~
acqq
And actually "its potential effectiveness in removing CO2 from the atmosphere
remains unproven."

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prawn
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?

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tosseraccount
Link to actual paper here :
[http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nc...](http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2722.html)

( paywall - _your tax dollars at work !!!_ )

 _This effect of ocean acidification was incorporated into a global marine
ecosystem model_

Are these climate models answering more questions or raising more questions?

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contingencies
Coming as it does on the heels of yesterday's sea level warning -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927099](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.

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jefurii
> “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?

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storf45
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.

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_red
"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?

~~~
moultano
Go read this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event)
I don't think any amount of alarm could possibly be enough.

~~~
gd1
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.

~~~
spacemanmatt
There's little risk of CO2 shortage. Every animal on the planet exhales it.
Burning fossil fuels was never necessary.

~~~
gd1
>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.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
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.

