The Pacific Ocean is so acidic that it's dissolving Dungeness crabs' shells
fox5vegas.com
fox5vegas.com
Plenty of bivalves and shellfish live in fresh water which has significantly lower PH levels (more like 7-7.5) and survive so this isn't some harbinger of the apocalypse, but it is change nonetheless.
A less misleading title would be "PH changes in ocean affect crab shell formation" or something like that.
Or maybe it's the fact I'm Canadian and we generally push back against extremism, alarmism, most isms really.
I've heard there's a hole in the ozone and we're all going to die from cancer and I've heard that New York will be underwater and all the glaciers will be gone by 2020. I've lived through 2 US presidents everyone has said are Hitler and somehow, despite the uproar being the loudest today, the world hasn't come to an end and things actually don't seem that bad.
So yes, when I see headlines that are obviously click bait it hits this little part of my brain that feels compelled to say that maybe, just maybe things aren't all that bad.
The reason you don't hear that anymore is not because there was no problem, but because the problem has been fixed by the implementation of the Montreal protocol. The ozon layer has been gradually recovering ever since.
> Or maybe it's the fact I'm Canadian and we generally push back against extremism, alarmism, most isms really.
How about other forms of alarmism, the reducing use of fossil fuels will destroy our way of life, collapse the economy, etc? I see a lot of people worried about "climate alarmism" but they never seem to be concerned about there own alarmsism.
> and I've heard that New York will be underwater and all the glaciers will be gone by 2020
Citation please? I see this claim frequently yet either no citations are provided or they rely on the readers lack of comprehension, memory or both. The alarmisim is probably in your head.
As for calling it "too acidic", that's fairly obviously more understandable for the lay reader than "not basic enough" would be.
https://www.rd.com/culture/predictions-that-didnt-come-true/
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/01/08/us/g...
For number 2, yes they revised the timeline, the glaciers are still retreating. Does an extrapolation on a long running process even count as being alarmist?
"...too acidic..." doesn't carry that same implication. On some scale, something is more acidic than optimum.
At least, that's the way I interpret the comments above. After reading the article, I knew exactly what was happening and didn't really think the title was click-bait, but can see how others might perceive it that way.
The headline is technically wrong, but the broad point, "things that we rely on are dying because of the changing pH of the ocean", is correct and meaningful.
The artivle you are refring to also says that the current rate of extinction is 10-100x that if previus mass extinctions. Unless you have some reason to believe we will manage to stop the ongoing ectinction event, then it will be a mass extinction by the time it is done; hence saying that we are in it.
So yeah, it's unlikely that humans could kill off all life on earth even if we keep trying to do so, but it's certainly possible that they'll cause their own destruction.
I think it's unlikely that human activity will lead to mass die-offs (of humans, we're already in a mass extinction event of animals) but our children and grandchildren may be in for a big lifestyle change.
The ocean Ph level doesn't have much to do with CO2 levels. It has everything to do with the rate of change of CO2 levels.
If you raise the CO2 level fast, the ocean turns acidic. If you raise it slowly, deposits of lime on the bottom of the ocean dissolve and Ph remains constant.
While CO2 has been much higher than the present, the rate of change is unprecedented.
Also evolution is a lot slower than you think. A change in Ph over millions of years could readily be adapted to by evolution. Over 20, not so much.
As for the crabs, some of them still develop hard shells. They'll reproduce and the soft-shelled ones won't. So whatever it is that causes harder shells will persist.
The fast mode is that if there is enough genetic diversity in the population that a subset have a combination of traits that suffices, natural selection quickly will reduce the genetic diversity and all of the survivors will have those traits. The advantage of sexual reproduction is that much of the genetic diversity is retained and gets to recombine in interesting ways allowing the next challenge to be addressed.
The slow mode is that if overcoming a barrier requires random mutations to produce new traits, it takes many generations for that to happen.
The current pH allows some to survive and others not to. But with projected future pH levels, none will be able to survive. Therefore natural selection will select out the entire population as there isn't enough time for a new set of traits to evolve.
Evolution in bacteria can therefore happen much more quickly than in larger organisms. Evolution in viruses is quicker still. (The flu that comes around each year is noticeably evolved from last year's one. In particular it is bred to avoid triggering immune system responses to recent flu variants.)
Crabs can't evolve at anything like the rate of bacteria.
The only news here is that they have actually been measured to be impacted at rates that they were predicted to be impacted. The overall conclusion of what will happen is not changed.
I think you presuppose climate change is a disaster in your extinction judgment rather than a transient response to human industrialization.
What I'm really worried about is that future brings us much more severe issues to deal with, which no multicellular life can survive. [1] The problem is quite urgent, and we only have 500M-1B years to deal with this.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
If the CO2 rises and stays raised, in a few thousand years the Ph will go back to its old value.
If we wanted to solve this problem, one of the better ideas is to crush limestone and dump it into the ocean. As a powder so that it dissolves before it can sink.
How much limestone do we need?
We are in a hole and I'd like to know who's still holding a shovel.
"In the 200-plus years since the industrial revolution began, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has increased due to humans burning fossil fuels (such as car emissions) and changing the way land is used (such as deforestation). During this time, the pH of surface ocean waters has fallen by 0.1 pH units. The pH scale, like the Richter scale, is logarithmic, so this change represents approximately a 30 percent increase in acidity."
https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-co...
The carbon dioxide isn't distributed evenly throughout the volume of the oceans. The pH change would be significantly slower if the whole volume could equilibrate instantaneously.
https://www.whoi.edu/know-your-ocean/ocean-topics/ocean-chem...
Currently, about half of the anthropogenic (human-caused) carbon dioxide in the ocean is found in the upper 400 meters (1,200 feet) of the water column, while the other half has penetrated into the lower thermocline and deep ocean. Density- and wind-driven circulation help mix the surface and deep waters in some high latitude and coastal regions, but for much of the open ocean, deep pH changes are expected to lag surface pH changes by a few centuries.
This is especially a problem for oceanic life because the vast majority of biological productivity and food people eat is also found in that upper portion. The euphotic zone where most photosynthesis takes place extends to about 200 meters below the surface.
To provide an analogy: Most folks are concerned about our acceleration, not our velocity. You can accelerate to 60mph slowly and comfortably, or you can accelerate to 60mph fast enough to kill you. It's not like 60mph is the problem, it's that if your biological systems don't have enough time to recover from the acceleration you will suffer consequences.
But partial pressure of oxygen gas was also higher, and oxygen is highly alkaline.
Oxygen, the molecule, is apolar and un-ionized. Ozone is not. The amount of ozone in the atmosphere, hence dissolving into the oceans, is predicated on how much oxygen is present during lightning strikes, which is dictated by the partial pressure of oxygen.
More generally, oxygen is reactive, and contributes to reactions in an electron-donating capacity, what we call 'oxidizing' whether or not oxygen is involved. Alkalines are oxidizing, acids are reducing; if you add HCL to KOH, the H+ will reduce the OH-, or equivalently, the OH- will oxidize the H+.
The safest answer would have actually been: we can do some vague guessing about conditions 150 million years ago, but we certainly can't go back in time and measure it. The existence of crabs is proof that they could form shells under those conditions; what those conditions were, is guesswork.
Same deal with oxygen, except that reactivity between oxygen and water (but not oxygen and ozone) is much lower.
Nitric acid is an oxidizer. Hydroiodic acid is a reducing agent.
Lithium peroxide is an alkaline oxidizer. Lithium aluminum hydride is an alkaline reducing agent.
> There is evidence for high CO2 concentrations between 200 and 150 million years ago of over 3,000 ppm, and between 600 and 400 million years ago of over 6,000 ppm.
For comparison:
> Global annual mean CO2 concentration has increased by more than 45% since the start of the Industrial Revolution, from 280 ppm during the 10,000 years up to the mid-18th century to 415 ppm as of May 2019. The present concentration is the highest for 14 million years.
From the fossil record we know that we last had something similar to the current levels about 15-20 million years ago, when our ancestors were just great apes. It was indeed a few degrees warmer and the sea level was higher. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008152242.h...
We do have very good levels from the more recent history from ice cores, which shows that the current rate of change is unequalled: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
And it didn't end up well, Permian-Triassic extinction event was the biggest mass extinction in history.
https://marinebiology.co/2015/04/10/greatest-mass-extinction...
The ocean will certainly recover in a few thousand years, or at worst a million. Human civilization's immediate prospects are less optimistic.
After a worldwide collapse of civilization, and forced population reduction below two billion, civilization will also begin to recover, and take maybe a century or three to get back to, say, the level of launching satellites. Global thermonuclear war could be expected postpone recovery to the upper end of the range.
Not with all the easily accessible hydrocarbons gone it won’t.
> Research indicates that recovery did not begin until the start of the mid-Triassic, 4 to 6 million years after the extinction;[73] and some writers estimate that the recovery was not complete until 30 Ma after the P–Tr extinction, i.e. in the late Triassic.[8]
The current extinction might not be as severe, but "a few thousand years" sounds really optimistic.
If civilization collapses, the sudden pulse of reforestation and radical reduction in CO2 production will clear the excess in a few decades. Many shelled species will survive just by waiting it out; do you recall the 400-year-old clam that turned up recently? It is mostly the larval forms at risk.
In that scenario civilization will have a very difficult time recovering, especially considering the massive disruption to agriculture.
In other words: geological-scale change allows time for species and ecosystems to adapt and migrate. Rapid ecological change is correlated with loss of biomass, biodiversity, and species. The source of risk is not the CO2 level, but the rate at which it has changed.
> Using a retrospective prediction from a regression models, we estimate an 8.3% increase in external carapace dissolution over the last two decades and identified a set of affected OA-related sublethal pathways to inform future risk assessment studies of Dungeness crabs.
Bad, but it seems no one actually measured this decades ago and it would be nice to have that data vs retrospective prediction. I believe them of course, it would just be nice to have real data if they’re claiming 8.3% estimation and not a range with expected looser precision for their sampling efforts.
Edit: for clarity
>> we estimate an 8.3% increase
> it would just be nice to have real data if they’re claiming exactly 8.3%
Point of fact, they don't claim "exactly" 8.3% -- they call it an estimate, and the notation indicates uncertainty -- read it as 8.3 ± 0.1%.
"8.3" probably reads as more authoritative than ">8%".
Whatever the case, 8% should be deeply alarming. Just how many % indicates a crashing ecosystem, and mass famine? Much of the world depends on ocean catch to get enough protein.
~8.1% was not alarming 50 years ago, so why 8.3% should be alarming now? I would be more concerned about the curve slope and shape.
Can you quantify that statement with any rigor?
"You don't tell people about the end of the world. If people knew how fucked they were, they would just get out of the industry and stop supporting us."
Seafood is the last wild food that normal people can still affordably and regularly eat. But there is a very real chance that our generation will be the last to do so.
A brief history of aquatic resource use in medieval Europe Richard C. Hoffmann
He want to to say the fishery industry is concerned with sustainability, after all these fisheries have been around for generations and want to stay that way. He claimed they carefully monitored fish populations to maintain stability in fishing.
I don't know enough about the subject. He could have been touting the official line fed to him, but he could have also been telling us the honest truth based on his team/company's research.
Doesn't matter how sustainable the fishing practices are, or how well they manage the populations, if the water quality won't support a population to begin with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
These systems are apparently too complex for us to make good predictions.
Cnidaria look like they may end up being pretty much the sole survivors - it has happened before
teach wildlife to adapt - GLWT
The page you are attempting to access is not available in your country.
About a hundred 3rd party vendors each with their own checkbox.
Of course, they have an accept all button. But not a reject all.
The fox5 thingy is more honest, at least they refuse to be accessible from Europe.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/27/us/pacific-ocean-acidificatio...
Can't demand others to do it you won't do it first.
Edit: Removed hyperbole.
Saving the environment is not about individual choice, it's about fixing an unsustainable system. It's unsustainable because negative externalities are not effectively taxed/banned. Bad behaviour is rewarded financially which further drives change in the wrong direction.
Making it about individual choice, and therefore subject to "hypocrisy" is an effective way of preventing change. Divide and conquer. It's undeniably the pervasive narative in the media (but again this can be explained by systemic effects - where does the money come from? Who stands to benefit?).
You can demand new rules that come in for everyone at the same time. That's how tax rates change, how universal healthcare systems are established, how slavery is ended.
Societies are ultimately shaped by what people believe is possible.
Edit: Your comment has changed, but you're still expressing the conviction that everyone has to do things voluntarily. That's not true - only enough power has to come together to make and enforce laws. A high bar, but not as insurmountable.
This is exactly my point. If 100% of the people calling for climate change "rules/laws" have no ability to follow their own ideas now, what hope is there?
(I removed one sentence that I felt was a little inflammatory, it was extraneous)
From sciencedirect.com:
> To our knowledge this is the first time that OA-related dissolution of calcite structures in situ has been demonstrated for crustaceans
> Using a retrospective prediction from a regression models, we estimate an 8.3% increase in external carapace dissolution over the last two decades
Given that not all larva show signs of OA-dissolution and this is the first study, it would be wise to wait for the next studies, to see actual trends.
The present concentration of co2 in the atmosphere according to Zhang, Yi Ge; et al. is the highest in 14m years. Given crabs in general have been around adapting for 145m years, I do not think the current levels will be detrimental.
That argument often comes up when discussing wildlife impacts of global warming. The problem is, the rate of CO2 increase vastly exceeds anything that happened naturally. The rate of change is the problem here.
It's not my field, but doesn't the rate-of-change matter even more than absolute value in time? Life can and does adjust, but it takes generations; if things change too fast, then only the quickest (smallest) life-forms can adapt.
If calcium carbonate-dense phytoplankton die off, the ocean gets fucked, and it'll no longer trap half the carbon dioxide generated on the planet, nor generate over half the planet's oxygen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
The ocean has always been highly acidic,
Nobody cares about the absolute pH, except insofar as it affects wildlife and the ability of the oceans to provide protein that billions of people depend on to live.
And that is being affected, as noted in TFA.
Kw is also used as cologarithm pKw. If you are not aware, X = 10^(-pX), and pX = -log(X). So a lower pH is a greater concentration of [H+] (actually [H3O+]), a lower pOH is a greater concentration of [OH-], and a lower pKw is a greater self-ionization of water.
pKw decreases with increasing temperature. It decreases with increasing pressure. And it decreases with increasing ionic strength until around 0.6-0.8, then goes back up.
While those are held constant, a dropping pH does indicate acidification. pH + pOH = pKw . But if they are not constant, pOH can drop at the same rate as pH, because pKw is also dropping. As long as pH and pOH are both near pKw/2, the solution is neutral. The solution is only acidifying when pH is decreasing faster than pOH.
If you become slightly less basic, your pOH goes up. Under normal circumstances, that means pH is going down by an equal amount. Either way you describe it in English, de-alkalinization usually yields the same mathematical results as acidification. Deviation from this rule, which holds at standard temperature and pressure, and constant ionic strength, requires additional explanation.
pH is directly related to the concentration of H+ ions in solution, which is equivalent to being inversely correlated with the concentration of OH- ions in solution (a reduction in OH- ion concentration means a relative increase in H+ ion concentration).
> Seawater is slightly basic, and ocean acidification involves a shift towards pH-neutral conditions rather than a transition to acidic conditions.
Also
> Between 1751 and 1996, surface ocean pH is estimated to have decreased from approximately 8.25 to 8.14
So we're not talking about water that is deadly to humans. Just water that disturbs certain delicate biological processes that could have knock-on effects to the food chain.