Ocean acidification due to carbon emissions is at highest for 300m years

Very cool I guess we will have to adapt. As current Industrial Complex is too large and unwieldy to react to such thing.

Fake science for the masses

Older article on the issue -

"The coming centuries may see more ocean acidification than the past 300 million years."

https://pangea.stanford.edu/research/Oceans/GES205/Caldeira_...

It seems to me, 300 million is used a lot since it's the period scientists can measure?

Probably it's gotten caught up in some sort of quote that we are heading to a time where it's higher than 300 million.

It wasn't hard to intuitively know the article is dodgy, it jumped between acidification, to pollution, to over fishing, not really related topics.

Well ocean acidification is real and proven. At this point all we're arguing about is how many years we have left.

Shop around; http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=ocean+acidification+&b...

Your right in the sense that there is nothing catastrophic from a the perspective of geological time. There have been mass extinctions before. The problem is that we would like to continue living in an environment similar to what we evolved in, and we would like to continue to have large amounts of bio-diversity and biological services available on a timeline that is useful to us. There is nothing particularly magical about the environment we want to live in, other than it happens to be about what it would be now if not for recent human actions. Unfortunately, those actions didn't just change the system, they re-introduced raw materials that have previously been removed from the system. There is no reason to believe that the new equilibrium is the same as the old one.

An interesting corollary to this is the idea that the natural environment is itself unsustainable. For billions of years it has been using up the planets supply of carbon and trapping it in what is now called fossil fuels. If this continues unchecked, we will run out of available carbon and life on this planet will die off. Thankfully, we humans have averted this catastrophe by finding a way to recycle the formerly lost carbon and return it to the environment. If only we had a large number of planets at varying stages of having life (including being long dead).

I live in Seattle and in just the past few years, beaches which used to be absolutely covered in oysters are now barren because of acidification. And by covered, I mean you need a path through them to walk (they are sharp), and the most difficult thing when picking them was to pick up a single one rather than cluster. This was on the Hood canal for anyone in the area.

http://apps.seattletimes.com/reports/sea-change/2013/sep/11/...

It absolutely amazed me how fast everything disappeared. It really shocked me.

The ocean's effect as a buffer is fading very rapidly.

The growth of cyanobacteria may have extremely harmful events. No organism on this planet has ever seen a rate of change as strong as this, so this is completely unpredictable territory.

Do you know why this isn't already happening at a pace to keep up with the changes they are measuring? Do you expect that the effects you mention are currently, but will soon catch up? I am honestly curious.

I read that just after reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Capitol trilogy. (40 days of rain, 50 degrees below, 60 days...) Yeah, it's science fiction, but it's plausible hard sf, not space opera. And the Time article sounded way too close to some of what was happening in the books.

Ocean acidification was mentioned somewhat in passing in the last book as something that's very hard to reverse, partially because of the chemistry and partially because of the sheer amount of chemicals that would be required. That was in contrast to a multi hundred billion dollar salt transport to restart the thermo haline circulation.

that was a really good series, including coverage of Puget Sound, which I thought was carefully protected, but you can only do so much

Oyster breeders forced to move:

http://apps.seattletimes.com/reports/sea-change/2013/sep/11/...

rising levels of caffeine, PCBs and antibiotics in the Sound's waters: (I can't google for recent articles, but STimes has written about it last 6 months

http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2002918517_pollution0...

Not all journalism or scientific reporting is about presenting solutions, and pointing out the problems (especially of this severity, if the article is to be believed) is an important step. Furthermore, as the article says, I don't think anyone knows the solution. Even if we drastically reduce carbon emissions, it probably won't help.

I often find an attitude of dismissal and disdain towards environmental reporting like this on Hacker News. I think it stems from how we're so used to the optimism and can-do attitude of Silicon Valley that it's hard to digest how we may have created a problem we can't solve. It feels better to think "oh, they're just not being innovative enough in their solutions" and present oneself as above the fray.

But the stark reality, if the science is to be believed, is that we're on the path towards major environmental changes in the foreseeable future, and as of right now, we don't have a solution.

The study talks about other pollutants (like Sulfur Oxide and other particulates), but not CO2. The amount of CO2 emited by these ships is not stated in the article, but can be estimated from their rate of fuel consumption. That said, in general ships are more efficient than cars, especially at this scale. It's entirely likely that the CO2 per mass of freight per distance covered by container ship is of the order of magnitude, or lower than in a car.

The sulphur issue is already being solved, and a solution will be in place by january 1, 2015

http://www.imo.org/OurWork/Environment/PollutionPrevention/A...

This is because of the sulphur emission control laws that will come into action then. Basically, ships will buy scrubbers that clean the exhaust gases, buy low sulphur diesel, or change to a completely different fuel.

The emissions control areas, or ECA:s as they are called, inlude US coasts, the North Sea, the English Channel and the whole Baltic Sea.

This will cause massive cost increases in shipping. Expect your import goods to be expensive and export profits to be less. Yet it will save lots of lives.

In case they will be taking it down, here is the text:

Ocean acidification due to carbon emissions is at highest for 300m years Overfishing and pollution are part of the problem, scientists say, warning that mass extinction of species may be inevitable

By Fiona Harvey in Kiel The Guardian, Thursday 3 October 2013

Coral is particularly at risk from acidification and rising sea temperatures. Photograph: Paul Jarrett/PA The oceans are more acidic now than they have been for at least 300m years, due to carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, and a mass extinction of key species may already be almost inevitable as a result, leading marine scientists warned on Thursday.

An international audit of the health of the oceans has found that overfishing and pollution are also contributing to the crisis, in a deadly combination of destructive forces that are imperilling marine life, on which billions of people depend for their nutrition and livelihood.

In the starkest warning yet of the threat to ocean health, the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) said: "This [acidification] is unprecedented in the Earth's known history. We are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change, and exposing organisms to intolerable evolutionary pressure. The next mass extinction may have already begun." It published its findings in the State of the Oceans report, collated every two years from global monitoring and other research studies.

Alex Rogers, professor of biology at Oxford University, said: "The health of the ocean is spiralling downwards far more rapidly than we had thought. We are seeing greater change, happening faster, and the effects are more imminent than previously anticipated. The situation should be of the gravest concern to everyone since everyone will be affected by changes in the ability of the ocean to support life on Earth."

Coral is particularly at risk. Increased acidity dissolves the calcium carbonate skeletons that form the structure of reefs, and increasing temperatures lead to bleaching where the corals lose symbiotic algae they rely on. The report says that world governments' current pledges to curb carbon emissions would not go far enough or fast enough to save many of the world's reefs. There is a time lag of several decades between the carbon being emitted and the effects on seas, meaning that further acidification and further warming of the oceans are inevitable, even if we drastically reduce emissions very quickly. There is as yet little sign of that, with global greenhouse gas output still rising.

Corals are vital to the health of fisheries, because they act as nurseries to young fish and smaller species that provide food for bigger ones.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by the seas – at least a third of the carbon that humans have released has been dissolved in this way, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – and makes them more acidic. But IPSO found the situation was even more dire than that laid out by the world's top climate scientists in their landmark report last week.

In absorbing carbon and heat from the atmosphere, the world's oceans have shielded humans from the worst effects of global warming, the marine scientists said. This has slowed the rate of climate change on land, but its profound effects on marine life are only now being understood.

Acidification harms marine creatures that rely on calcium carbonate to build coral reefs and shells, as well as plankton, and the fish that rely on them. Jane Lubchenco, former director of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a marine biologist, said the effects were already being felt in some oyster fisheries, where young larvae were failing to develop properly in areas where the acid rates are higher, such as on the west coast of the US. "You can actually see this happening," she said. "It's not something a long way into the future. It is a very big problem."

But the chemical changes in the ocean go further, said Rogers. Marine animals use chemical signals to perceive their environment and locate prey and predators, and there is evidence that their ability to do so is being impaired in some species.

Trevor Manuel, a South African government minister and co-chair of the Global Ocean Commission, called the report "a deafening alarm bell on humanity's wider impacts on the global oceans".

"Unless we restore the ocean's health, we will experience the consequences on prosperity, wellbeing and development. Governments must respond as urgently as they do to national security threats – in the long run, the impacts are just as important," he said.

Current rates of carbon release into the oceans are 10 times faster than those before the last major species extinction, which was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum extinction, about 55m years ago. The IPSO scientists can tell that the current ocean acidification is the highest for 300m years from geological records.

They called for strong action by governments to limit carbon concentrations in the atmosphere to no more than 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent. That would require urgent and deep reductions in fossil fuel use.

No country in the world is properly tackling overfishing, the report found, and almost two thirds are failing badly. At least 70 per cent of the world's fish populations are over-exploited. Giving local communities more control over their fisheries, and favouring small-scale operators over large commercial vessels would help this, the report found. Subsidies that drive overcapacity in fishing fleets should also be eliminated, marine conservation zones set up and destructive fishing equipment should be banned. There should also be better governance of the areas of ocean beyond countries' national limits.

The IPSO report also found the oceans were being "deoxygenated" – their average oxygen content is likely to fall by as much as 7 per cent by 2100, partly because of the run-off of fertilisers and sewage into the seas, and also as a side-effect of global warming. The reduction of oxygen is a concern as areas of severe depletion become effectively dead.

Rogers said: "People are just not aware of the massive roles that the oceans play in the Earth's systems. Phytoplankton produce 40 per cent of the oxygen in the atmosphere, for example, and 90 per cent of all life is in the oceans. Because the oceans are so vast, there are still areas we have never really seen. We have a very poor grasp of some of the biochemical processes in the world's biggest ecosystem."

The five chapters of which the State of the Oceans report is a summary have been published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, a peer-reviewed journal.

That comment was written yesterday. The embargo ended THIS morning at 6am BST.

There's nothing to this. It's customary for news outlets to wait until they get the go ahead from an organization/company/govt releasing a report (usually done simultaneously). So as to not play favorites, I guess.

In case anybody is wondering how jellyfish are relevant: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/rise-of-jellyfish-reveals-...

Can humans eat jellyfish? Maybe part of the solution is to shift overfishing to the jellyfish population.

> Can anyone think of other cases where science is used to predict the future of complex systems more than 2 years in advance?

Every empirically-based plan for business, long-term policy, etc., ever. The forward-looking aspect of the science of cosmology. Lots more.

> So far, the only ones I can think of are models that always spit out the same message... "The earth is dying and we're at fault."

That's more indicative of the biases through which you filter the available information (perhaps most importantly, the bias in the information sources from which you receive information -- e.g., if the main place you get information about "science used to predict the future of complex systems" is the mainstream commercial media, there's a pretty heavy bias in what predictions you are going to hear about.)

Medicine. "You're going to die in 20 years due to your diabetes."

If things get too bad for too many, I suspect the result in an increase in war and conflict.

What would happen is that the rate of biodiversity drops drastically, and organisms that are simple and adaptable (like cockroaches, algae, jellyfich, certain classes of bacteria, small mammals, urban birds) adapt and thrive and consume the rest of the flora and fauna, and permanently adapt their environments making the situation extremely fragile for more complex and delicate birds and larger vertebrates.

Also, the system goes out of the equilibrium slowly developed in the last climate age.

As far as crops go, we'll see new varieties of plant illnesses appearing in places we hadn't seen them before. Unpredictable weather kills the more fragile species that depend on consistent climate.

Some ecosystems become simply uninhabitable; the Siberian bog swamps which are beginning to melt and release a greater amount of methane than ever before seen by humanity will not support the current crop of bacteria and plants. However there are no mammals and complex predators that can effectively fill the niche that will be created (at least not for potentially many thousands of years). So what you'll have is the growth of tall grasses and bushes that can survive on the new climate, but lacking a sustaining ecosystem, there won't be birds or large predators. Since insects develop very rapidly they will probably thrive, but their impact on the new ecosystem will not be predictable.

A lot of land probably won't be able to support crops, however the current state of industrial farming leaves the land depleted, so it will take many generations to replete the topsoil necessary for more balanced wildlife to survive.

Amphibians are already at a stage of mass extinction; their porous skin allows for a very large degree of exchange with chemicals in their environment, and are already suffering the effects of pesticides and herbicides in the environment. If those things biodegrade effectively that effect will not be felt in a few decades, but the change of climate will probably be too much (it already is).

We are actually a week from the anniversary of the world's first act of geo-vigilantism: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/the-f....

Really fascinating stuff.

There is a proposed geoengineering approach, but the authors of this page don't recommend it:

https://web.duke.edu/nicholas/bio217/spring2010/chang/GeoEng...

http://www.cquestrate.com/the-idea

Not without a significant energy expenditure.

But most of our energy sources of course produce CO2 and other products.

When asking about our ability to geiengineer, remember that we are the once that caused this problem in the first place, and without even trying. Having said that, releasing CO2 is a much easier problem than removing it. As to your proposal, CO2 would decompose into C2 and O2 (with twice as many O2 molecules). Incidentally, C2 is a strong acid [1]. Additionally, breaking CO2 this way would move it to a higher energy state, and therefore require a net input of energy. (Technically, given what I know, it is possible that there is just a high activation energy to do this, but seeing as CO2 is such a common product of energy releasing reactions, including metabolism, I'm pretty sure it is just a low energy molecule). Also, it took pretty much all of our industrial force to introduce the CO2 in the first place, and there was huge economic incentive.

The more popular ideas in geo-engineering are to let nature do the hard work for us. For example, a common idea is to introduce iron to the ocean. This would increase plankton populations, and the plankton would then use solar power to remove CO2.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatomic_carbon

A few people are talking about "geoengineering" approaches, e.g. pumping sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to cause a cooling effect. But such ideas are pretty fringe, I suspect because a) they sound crazy b) that kind of intervention risks serious unexpected consequences.

Basic thermodynamics can provide a lower limit : at least 9x more energy than was gained by burning it (except for oil burned in power plants, where it'd be 6-7x, but that's not much).

That seems to mean that without massive expansions in nuclear power it's just not in the cards.

I find it incredibly sad it has made the top post.

The article does not link to any peer review studies to prove it's point, which to me means it's probably bunk, taking a know issue and enlarging it to sensationalise.

And it's sad people fall for this.

It is the top post.

Wait, so you're saying that despite the fact that: - We have accurate measurements of ocean Ph and CO2 concentrations for the past 50 years - We have a clear understanding of the emissions of CO2 from manmade sources and a record that goes back since the beginning of the industrial age - We understand the effects of acidification on a large variety of ocean species - We see a trend of ocean absorbtion of CO2 absolutely consistent with out knowledge of atmospheric chemistry

That means that it's BS?

If you had some evidence to back up the fact as to why a set of multiple thousands of studies in oceanography are flawed when they point out to a singular trend, with a margin of confidence greater than most of the so-called scientific facts that are out there, I wouldn't think what you write is plain denialism.

One of the saddest parts of this whole saga is how the carbon dioxide alarmists have hijacked research budgets and public interest which could be spent dealing with legitimate environmental concerns.

The Guardian is a UK newspaper. "<num>m" always means Million in the UK, unlike continental Europe.

I agree that the continued use of the abbreviation in the article itself is bad journalism.

300 million.

I was confused by this, as well. Given the scale of geologic time, I'd assume they meant 300 million. But a single "M" often means thousand, especially if it's lowercase. So it's confusingly worded.

Wasn't it 300 thousand?

Are you high? What does radioactivity from Fukushima have to do with ocean acidification?

Heat, ocean waves and the earth's rotation are so many orders of magnitude apart in terms of frequency that a machine designed to dampen one could not possibly have an effect on the others.

>This is in no way related to Hacker News

The vast majority of "show HN: my new disruptive pseudo-plagiarized wheel-reinventing RESTful scalable .js + go single-page site framework" or "_insert_valley_startup_here_ plans to revolutionize _trivial_consumer_SaaS_niche_" posts have little to do with actual hacking, either. Few complain about those.

Here we have a post that points out a massive systemic problem we're facing as a species for which we have no current solution. Pretty sure we're in hacker territory. Much more so than in the case of the Yet-Another-Web-Framework or Disruptive-Instagram-For- Squirrels crap we normally get on the front page.

HN attracts some highly intelligent and resourceful people who do things that are radical and can change the way all other people do things. And I think these are the very people who can help to fix these sorts of real world problems.

One could argue that this would affect any number of technological subjects. From the obvious 'no oceans, no life, no technology' to the subtle change in stocks due to the report that the article is covering.

> Why does this belong on Hacker News?

You may want to re-read the guidelines.

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> I have no problem with interesting articles being upvoted

What topics do you think should be on HN?