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Comment by phyzome | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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