California oceans rising in acidity at alarming rate, study finds
latimes.com
latimes.com
Whenever I see these articles, unfortunately my first thought is "we're too far gone, we can't turn around now" in terms of climate change. But! I think that instead of trying to reverse the situation (for instance, by convincing the largest carbon emitters like China to stop - which they won't), we should try to make use of the situation.
Too much carbon being released? Free carbon! How can we use it to make something else / convert it to something else? Too much acid in the ocean? How can we extract it and use it for something? Rising temps? How can we make use of this to grow crops that need warmer environments, or use it for better solar generation, or use thermal power generation in these areas. Our best hope it to adapt to the new norm rather than fight a losing battle. I know it's fatalistic, but I think we will last longer as a species if we adopt this approach instead.
It’s the same way I see politicians doing nothing helpful, people are just going to have to work around them to get the situation under control or at least make use of it.
The issues associated with an acidified ocean are well known. The issues associated with an excess of carbon in the atmosphere are well known. The cost of coping with most of these issues has been compared to the cost of working to prevent or reduce their effect with respect to lives, quality of life, and dollars.
I don't claim to be a climatologist, an economist, or a policy expert, but I can read a wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_of_recent_climate_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming_on_h... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
To use your analogy, put a stop light in the middle of the road, just in case a kid happens to run out at that point.
As such, I heartily endorse your 'how do we make use of that?' attitude, but I also will never agree with your assertion that our best hope is to accept it as a new norm, or to accept it's a losing battle.
It's just like how in business you want to get new customers, but you also want to reduce costs. Any company that chooses to care about only one of those things is doomed in the long-run.
While we're at it, how much overhead do we add to global power requirements for all these de-acidification plants, desalination plants and CCS contraptions? How about we stop pouring it in the top and just fucking decarbonise, and leave all those tar sands alone... :)
Might be easier to devise a biotech solution, but messing with ecosystems is quite risky nonetheless. An example would be putting carbon fixing bacteria or algae in the water, additionally replacing the plankton that died due to change in pH. We have similar technology for cleaning up oil spills and some chemicals, so why not dilute carbonic acid as well.
The next stage in climate denialism is climate nihilism: thinking that it's too late now to do anything to directly confront the problem so why bother. All it does is protect and entrench existing extractive interests. We can accomplish amazing things (landing on the moon, overthrowing the nazis and winning WW2) when we align our society and focus the right incentives.
Anything we do to adapt along the margins won't mitigate the next great mass of people opening the spigot on high carbon lifestyles. Political systems will buckle under the weight of human migration away from the vulnerable coasts[1] and once-fertile land now too chaotic to farm[2]. We need to fund and develop the next wave of low-carbon tech to make it good enough and cheap enough to satisfy people's needs now, not piddle around looking for ways to monetize the fall.
1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z
2. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-28/crazy-mid...
"up to 630 M people live on land below projected annual flood levels for 2100, and up to 340 M for mid-century, versus roughly 250 M at present"
250 million people already live in those annually flooded regions, so that's only another 400 million by the year 2100. You think political systems can't cope? China has 300 million migrant workers, most of whom re-migrate every year!! They're coping already. We just need a lot of trains.
> Is There Enough Mineable Olivine?
> Yes!
> There is more than enough olivine for global scale CO2 removal for the foreseeable future. Olivine is the most abundant mineral in the upper mantle, making up over 50% of it. There large reserves all over the world found near the surface, in a formation called dunite, which consists of greater than 90% olivine. The current price is also attractive, at $25 a ton with the ability to go below $10 a ton with increased mining.
"Unlimited free mildly poisonous garbage" isn't really a great deal.
The best approach to making use of it appears to be from US Naval Research: electrically driven extraction of CO2+H2 which can then be combined into fuel. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312163311_Developme...
But that requires inputting more energy than you got from burning the fuel in the first place. So after California is fully converted to electric cars and the vast desert solar PV fields have a big surplus in the day, you could use that process to extract fuel from the ocean at prices somewhat higher than drilling it out of the ground.
They took 0.5 meters of sediment.
They examined shells in the sediment, and using a very convoluted and new measurement technique, they found that 'larger' shells were at the bottom (without very much statistical certainty.) And, the study admits that other factors -- such as water temperature -- could effect the size/shell thickness... to what degree is ignored.
They then radiodated this 0.5 meter column of sludge, and after making assumptions about this and that and nuclear bomb testing and a host of other assumptions, they determined that the bottom of the 0.5 meter column was from 100 years ago, and the top more recent. (And, of course, they assume the sedimentation was perfectly uniform during the century because... reasons.)
And, then you have a graph, showing a decrease in some factor of shells (using a new measuring system) over a span of 100 years (give or take 100 years)...
they then claim the decrease is due to CO2, and Voila, the paper is sucked up by Nature.
I'm not criticizing the work. I'm sure the researchers would be the first to admit their conclusion is based on a host of assumptions and guesswork.
But, what I do find amusing is that a speculative study involving 0.5 meters of mud can get HN readers to begin proposing massive 'de-acidification' plants and fretting about the end of the world.
But it makes for less alarming headlines to say "Oceans becoming less alkaline", doesn't it?
I really, really wish things were presented dispassionately and accurately. Things like this smack of propaganda.
one just takes fewer words
0) Osborne et al. (2019) Decadal variability in twentieth-century ocean acidification in the California Current Ecosystem. https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0499-z
For example, I can’t remember the first time i read about ‘ arctic ice completely disappearing in the next ten years‘, or the polar bear going extinct..
There are a couple reasons this sucks: - some people seem to not care about that far in the future - people seem to be pretty bad at detecting change in their environment over longer time scales
A memorable example of the second one: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b...
So either "California coast" or rather "California coastal waters", since the article is talking about the watery part of the coast, not the "landy" part.