Ocean waves play greater role in trapping CO2 than previously understood | Hacker News Reader

Ocean waves play greater role in trapping CO2 than previously understood

phys.org

142 pointsstartupflix39 comments

Lest people think "ooh, this is great!" -- it's not, at least not beyond "having a better understanding of the world is good".

The following might be reasonable (if not necessarily feasible) carbon sinks:

  - Conversion to other materials (plastic, graphite, fuel (sort of))
  - Injection into salt domes

The following are bad carbon sinks:

  - Your lungs
  - The ocean

CO2 dissolving in the ocean produces carbonic acid, and ocean acidification is a huge problem -- it dissolves the shells of a number of creatures, and fucks up the entire biochemistry of the ecosystem. Remember, a lot of bacteria (including ones right at the bottom of the food web) use the ocean water as a sort of communal extracellular medium for nutrient exchange, and pH affects nutrient availability differently for different nutrients. Changing the pH throws everything out of whack, just like making your blood more acidic or basic would hurt or kill you.

The sky is not falling.

There are immense quantities of certain creatures in the ocean that take CO2, emit O2, and eventually die and sink to the bottom of the ocean, thus building deep layers of sediments and sequestering enormous amounts of carbon.

They've been doing this for almost 2 billion years: phytoplankton account for about half of all photosynthetic activity on Earth (thereby consuming CO2); 50-85% of the oxygen in the atmosphere is produced via phytoplankton photosynthesis. There have been past periods with at least 10x the current CO2 level, yet all of these oceanic organisms have thrived through it all.

[added] The massive accumulation of dead plankton in sea floors for millions of years is the primary origin story of oil and coal. Clearly oceans are a very large carbon sink.

You're one chart away from [deleted].

What do you mean?

I can't find a link to the it now but in the late 90s/early 00s there was a great research paper that found that we have lost a significant fraction of our phytoplankton biomass, estimated at about 10-20% of the population between 1970 and 1995 due to pollution in the oceans. Our most important oxygen producers are also the most vulnerable to pollution and ocean acidification.

The sky isn't "falling" but combined with all of the other trends we've been seeing, we have no idea just how bad it can get it or if there is a cliff where our economic/political systems begin to rapidly collapse under the pressure of environmental effects. From what I can tell from the last few years of research, our best climate models have been woefully underestimating negative second order effects and since our ecosystems and economies are interdependent there are few to no positives.

Actually, calcifying plankton have been increasing 10x in abundance (i.e. an order of magnitude) in the North Atlantic over the last 45 years, as carbon input into ocean waters has increased. ... "This finding was diametrically opposed to what scientists had expected since coccolithophores make their plates out of calcium carbonate, which is becoming more difficult as the ocean becomes more acidic and pH is reduced." [1]

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160116215419.h...

Is this the paper you have in mind?

* Daniel G. Boyce, Marlon R. Lewis & Boris Worm. Global phytoplankton decline over the past century. Nature 466, 591–596 (2010).

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09268

If your best argument against man-made global warming is "But the phytoplankton will be fine!" you might as well admit defeat, because that's like arguing against preparing for Hurricane because alligators will be fine.

Please re-read what I wrote and what I was replying to. I'm stating that an additional, slight increase in CO2 capture by the mechanism of ocean waves is not as such a sky-is-falling discovery, because there are enormous quantities of organisms in the ocean that very successfully feed on this CO2.

OK, yes, the ocean is a good carbon sink when carbon is added slowly over millions of years via photosynthetic creatures absorbing CO2, converting it to carbohydrates, and then dying.

...which is not a century-scale geoengineering project.

Co2 absorption is likely also enchanced by water/air mixing that exists in uneven shore terrain, like bays/fjords/reefs/underwater rocks/etc which create powerful underwater currents with tides and weather. https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0485(1989)... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0037073880... There is also a biological component: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/tiny-shrimp-may-be-m...

Are man made structures that interfere with the crashing of waves are having an effect on atmospheric CO2?

Excellent. Global warming>more storms> more waves> more CO2 trapped... hard to make that in to a solution though!

Not a complete solution, but a dampening feedback loop, giving humanity a bit more time to come up with solutions.

Melting ice is a positive feedback loop (less light is reflected, thus more warming). I wonder which contribution is greater: melting ice, or CO2 trapping waves (?)

Yes, a chaotic system which is hard to predict.

The increased acidification isn't excellent, though.

I would put ocean acidification on par with or being worse than global warming by itself.

then you would be happy to know that there is zero scientific evidence supporting ocean acidfication. the science is based on data from measurements of PH values before chemistry established the existence of an acid or base, let alone the ocean is actually not acidic but has a PH between 7.5 and 8.4, so if anything the ocean is becoming more neutral if there were in fact any basis to the argument. I'm glad I was able to lighten up your day now that you no longer have to worry about this phoney science.

Can't even tell if satire.

I just did some back of the envelope math and I believe dissolving all of the atmospheric co2 into the oceans would lead to a concentration of about 2g/m^3. Not sure what the effect of that on pH would be, but sure sounds like it wouldn't be a lot.

I did a similar calculation to figure out how much energy it would take to acidify the ocean just a little bit, and it was absolutely ridiculous magnitude of a number it wouldn't be possible even if we tried.

It just goes to show how anyone can use math + the wrong assumptions to come to the conclusions they already had.

Garbage in, garbage out.

It would be a much smaller shift if the CO2 were uniformly mixed through the whole depth of the ocean. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are rising too rapidly for that. It takes thousands of years for the deep ocean to uniformly mix with near-surface water. The acidification effects over the "short" (decades-centuries) time scale are concentrated in the upper few hundred meters of ocean. Unfortunately, those upper few hundred meters are also where the vast majority of oceanic biological productivity are located. The acidification is worst where it's most biologically worrisome.

...let alone the ocean is actually not acidic but has a PH between 7.5 and 8.4, so if anything the ocean is becoming more neutral if there were in fact any basis to the argument.

This is a bit like arguing that global warming isn't real because places like Antarctica are really cold and any warming would just make the temperature less cold and not warm.

Given that most of the "really cold" places are well below freezing, then any warming from "well below freezing" to "a little bit less well below freezing" means that most of the snow and ice (maybe pretty much all of it) still stays frozen. And what does melt may just quickly refreeze pretty much in place when temps drop again, as they usually do. So there's that.

Also, in the oceans salt water has to get to at least a couple of degrees below zero C before it actually freezes, at which point it turns into freshwater ice as it expels its salt. But then that freshwater ice has to warm back up to at least zero C before it melts again, leading to a small but real "anti-melting" bias. So there's that.

Also, floating ice actually increases in density (decreases in volume) as it melts and turns to water. I forget the exact numbers, but it has to warm by several degrees above freezing before it expands to the point where it actually takes up more volume that the frozen/not-quite-frozen variety. This leads to small but real "anti-expansion" bias. So there's that.

Fun stuff, huh?

I really wish I could downvote you for spreading FUD.

https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/file/Hawaii+Carbon+Dioxide+Tim...

More CO2 will be turned into Coral, there's lots of feedback loops here

> CO2 will be turned into Coral

No.

In actual fact and science, yes, emphatically yes. Reef-building corals contain photosynthetic algae; these zooxanthellae are an endosymbiont that depends on and consumes CO2 for the direct benefit of its host. [1]

Up to 90% of the organic material photosynthetically produced by the zooxanthellae is transferred to the host coral tissue. "This is the driving force behind the growth and productivity of coral reefs." [2]

The coral polyps thrive when they have access to nutrients produced by their symbiont algae. These algae thrive when they have access to CO2, H2O, and sunlight. Thus CO2 does turn into coral reefs.

[1] Coral-algae metabolism and diurnal changes in the CO2-carbonate system of bulk sea water (2014) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4034600/

[2] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_corals/cora...

Ok, technically yes, but ocean acidity is a far bigger effect, and that's what the GP was confused about.

Please stop moving goalposts, and quit denying scientific facts.

1. As described above, CO2 feeds symbiont algae and thereby drives the growth of coral reefs.

2. The algae and polyps have been shown to be constantly adapting to variations in local pH levels and water temperature. [1] As one would expect based on a) understanding the theory of evolution; b) observed "bleaching" and re-colonizations of corals for wider, mid- to long-term variations; and c) 20+ million years of corals thriving under a wide range of water temperatures, CO2 levels, and pH levels.

[1] Active modulation of the calcifying fluid carbonate chemistry (δ11B, B/Ca) and seasonally invariant coral calcification at sub-tropical limits (2017) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-14066-9

CO2 turns into carbonic acid, which dissolves coral. More CO2 = less coral. Less exoskeletons of all sorts, which is Really Bad for the ocean.

But more warming also causes seas to warm, which causes CO2 to evaporate from the water, so the effect may be a wash.

Technically that is exactly how you make a solution ... of carbonic acid!

Two stories just out of HWU, both related to the uptake of CO2 by the oceans and apparently pointing in opposite directions.

https://www.hw.ac.uk/about/news/new-research-reveals-ocean-w...

https://www.hw.ac.uk/about/news/invisible-barrier-on-ocean-s...

Tangential: Biosphere 2 had CO2 absorption issues with the concrete of the superstructure. http://biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/bio3/2000projects/carroll_d_...

This is just depressing. Just a couple weeks back we saw the article about plastic being found at the botton of the Mariana trench and now this.

Peeing from sufficient height also traps CO2. Can anyone confirm?

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