Ocean acidification may cause dramatic changes to phytoplankton
newsoffice.mit.edu
newsoffice.mit.edu
Fact is, a lot of the rest of the chaos that is predicted from climate change is, on a long baseline, a more or less normal state of affairs.
So the oceans are going to rise, flooding out couple billion coastal residents over the next 50 years? Sucks for them, sure, but actually that's a slower rate of population-dislocation than we've seen over the last 50 years from rural-urban migrations. Shame about the sunk costs and lost nations and all that, but civilisation has lived through worse, and will go on.
So the rising and warming oceans are going to drown the great coral reef ecosystems? No problem -- every coral reef in the world was drowned by the great meltwater pulses at the end of the last Ice Age. They reconstituted themselves after a few thousand years. They can do that again.
So the ice-free north pole is going to kill the polar bears? Yeah, probably, most of them -- but there've been ice-free north poles many previous times in the Polar bears' 2.5-million-year evolutionary history. Evidence suggests that during the warmest part of interglacial periods, they hybridise with Grizzlies and then re-speciate when the climate cools down again. They can cope -- and even if they can't, losing an apex predator isn't the worst thing that can happen to an ecosystem.
Losing the base of the food chain, however, is.
My point is not that climate change isn't real, or that humans aren't causing it, or that the disruptions it will cause won't be horrible and tragic and painful and expensive -- my point is that both ecosystems and civilisations are complex adaptive systems which have already proven themselves to be reasonably robust against exactly these sort of disruptions.
Ocean acidification is different than sea level rise and global warming, however. With ocean acidification, we're making an excursion unlike anything the planet has seen in 300 million years. There's simply no precedent that allows us to say "yeah, it's gonna hurt, but the world has already shown that it can cope with this kind of thing". It hasn't. As far as we know, this level of OA could produce a full trophic collapse -- and that isn't something that even I can't be cavalier about, as it would certainly be a civilisation-limiting (and possibly complex-life-limiting) event. Until we know for certain that the impacts of OA will be less severe than this, we should be doing everything we can to stop and reverse it.
No, because you're a large adult organism. But if you were a tiny crustacean, you wouldn't be able to grow a shell. This affects tiny crustaceans, but also the young of large species such as king crabs.
But I really expect that simple organisms (like, you know, plankton) will evolve to survive
I don't think a small change in ph is as hard for evolution as dealing with the already high amount of salt in oceans
The Zebra mussels are probably going to survive as well
What makes you confident of that?
In a similar past scenery all known species of Ammonitoidea vanished and dissapear, but some similar cephalopods just lose the external shell, growth a skin over the shell somehow or put the remains of the shell inside the body and its descendants are doing fine as octopus, squids and cuttlefish.
It will be a disaster for the humans that need clams, crustaceans and sea ursins to feed this families, and hundreds of marine species will not survive of course, but for a few species this will be a real blessing.
If this happens fast then the die-off will be larger. The loss of diversity also makes those populations less robust to other shocks (what if the acid tolerant individuals within a species also tend to really like cold water, and then oceans warm?).
Yes, we could see evolution happen, but one of the ways evolution acts is through mass extinctions.
Take a look here:
http://www.miseagrant.umich.edu/lessons/lessons/by-broad-con...
You don't get to redefine commonly used terms just because they're new to you and you think that they sound scary.
Another definition of a basic salt would be a salt that contains amounts of both hydroxide and other anions. White lead is an example. It is basic lead carbonate, or lead carbonate hydroxide. These salts are insoluble and are obtained through precipitation reactions.
So good luck with that exercise.
However acidification is a slow process (compared to rate of plancton reproduction - of course Plankton is a generic term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankton and it varies by species)
"Since pre-industrial times, the pH of the oceans has dropped from an average of 8.2 to 8.1 today. Projections of climate change estimate that by the year 2100, this number will drop further, to around 7.8"
Neutral pH is 7, so we can say even the ocean is basic and still will continue to be for some time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...
But I don't think we should only be scared by things that cause "full trophic collapse". We're looking at unprecedented environmental changes (in terms of speed) at about the same time the world population will be hitting 11 Billion people. Foreseeing how all the variables will interact is almost impossible.
Yes, the earth and life will go on. But it very well could be a horrible and scary place to live for us humans in the interim.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/nov/03/global-wa...
11 billion * .10 = 1.1 billion
Right now:
11.3% of the world’s population is hungry. That’s roughly 805 million people who go undernourished on a daily basis, consuming less than the recommended 2,100 calories a day.
That number will increase.
> We know the entire exogenic carbon cycle ... underwent a −0.2 % to −0.3 % perturbation in δ13C ...
[citation needed] much? And yet, wikipedia is not standardized nor enforced for such things. Sorry for the digression.
>So the rising and warming oceans are going to drown the great coral reef ecosystems? No problem -- every coral reef in the world was drowned by the great meltwater pulses at the end of the last Ice Age. They reconstituted themselves after a few thousand years. They can do that again.
NOAA says it takes 10k years at least [0], which is quite a long time, and that's assuming optimal conditions. Reefs are immediately threatened by ocean acidification, warming waters, biodiversity loss, and physical ecosystem destruction. In current conditions, all coral reefs will be in danger of extinction by 2050; 10% of world coral reefs have already died off. (and the damage due to bleaching and biodiversity loss at those which haven't yet is obvious and apparent to every person who has frequented them in the last 30 years)
I don't think anyone is particularly worried about humans ending the long time viability of life on Earth; we can't wipe out everything, and the Earth's ecosystems will recover over a period of time proportional to the size of the human caused disaster. It's sort of alarming that you present such a straw man argument, as if you're reading a science fiction novel, where it's all going to be okay because in a few million years, things will be back on track again, and you seem to be completely unconcerned with the immediate impacts and benefits of these ecosystems, completely detached from the reality at hand.
We're talking about real ecosystems and their incalculable impact (there are estimates of the economic importance of reefs, but it is the scientific and social impacts which are incalculable) on real people, alive today, living right now, that should be alarming and upsetting enough without considering long-term geological scale issues.
A second point.
>Fact is, a lot of the rest of the chaos that is predicted from climate change is, on a long baseline, a more or less normal state of affairs.
This statement is actually most inaccurate when it comes to the current rate of climate change. There are multiple studies, and levels of evidence, at multiple geological time scales, which show that the current and predicted rates of warming are unprecedented throughout geological time. The current rate of warming is faster now than at any time in the last 11,000 years [1], and it may occur faster than any climate change which has occurred in the last 65 million years [2], current rates of warming are substantially faster than that at the end of an ice age [3], and CO2 levels are currently higher than at any point within the last 800,000 years [4].
It is important to understand that these issues will have real impacts on real people in the immediate future, and being optimistic on the scale of geological time is absurdly detached from a day to day reality.
Climate change, biodiversity loss, and ocean acidification will have serious impact on the immediate time scale, and are largely unprecedented in the geological time scale.
[0] http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/corals/coral04_r...
[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/13/global_w...
[2] http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/august/climate-change-spe...
[3] http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/pd/climate/factsheets...
[4] http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/04/09/3424704/carbon-d...
> We're talking about real ecosystems and their incalculable impact (there are estimates of the economic importance of reefs, but it is the scientific and social impacts which are incalculable) on real people, alive today, living right now, that should be alarming and upsetting enough without considering long-term geological scale issues.
My point isn't that people shouldn't be upset. My point is that it's important to spend one's upset wisely, not to exhaust it on things which don't matter as much.
And frankly, considering evolutionary timescales doesn't automatically make everything better -- it just puts things in perspective. Yes, a world without Polar Bears would be a worse world. But considering the bigger picture, we're already living in a worse world. I'm already pissed off about what we did to all the other hominids, and the Mammoths, and the Woolly Rhinoceroses, and the Glyptodonts, and the Sabre-Toothed Cats, and the giant Sloths, and the giant Lemurs, and the Aurochs, and the Elephant Birds, and the Sea Cows, etc. etc. etc... The world was once a more wondrous place, and we butchered it. Adding Polar Bears to that list will absolutely upset me further -- but, as the record shows, like it or not, life will go on.
I don't say this to be cavalier. I say this because it's important to be able to distinguish "life will go on" scenarios from "life won't go on" scenarios. Those are also something we can see in the geological record, and are worth taking very damn seriously. If we lose Polar Bears (or coral reefs, or other charismatic indicators which people tend to focus on), life will go on. If we lose plankton, it won't. If we focus our upset and our policy-making on the former -- at the expense of the latter -- then we're potentially in very serious trouble.
>> Fact is, a lot of the rest of the chaos that is predicted from climate change is, on a long baseline, a more or less normal state of affairs.
> This statement is actually most inaccurate when it comes to the current rate of climate change. There are multiple studies, and levels of evidence, at multiple geological time scales, which show that the current and predicted rates of warming are unprecedented throughout geological time. The current rate of warming is faster now than at any time in the last 11,000 years [1],
True, but this is cherry-picking the data. Extend that window to 15,000 years, and it is no longer even close to true.
> and it may occur faster than any climate change which has occurred in the last 65 million years [2],
Yeah... um, sorry, that's a load of bunk. First of all, they're not talking about what's happening today, they're talking about the worst-case end-of-century 6c models, which rely on scenarios in which population growth doesn't slow down and solar panels don't get cheap. Even considering this, saying that this will be "10x worse than any climate change of the past 65 million years" would require being pretty wildly ignorant of what's happened in the past 65 million years. During Meltwater Pulse 1A (14.6k years ago), sea levels were rising at 50-100cm per decade. Not even the worst-case 6c models predict anything like that. And during the Zanclean flood (5.33M years ago), sea levels were falling at 50-100cm per month (unless you were in the Mediterranean, in which case they were rising at 20-40cm per hour). So, really: we're heading towards a climate event which is 10x more dramatic than that? My ass. Absolute ignorant rubbish.
> current rates of warming are substantially faster than that at the end of an ice age [3], and CO2 levels are currently higher than at any point within the last 800,000 years [4].
Yeah, and that last point is something to be genuinely worried about. As is the fact that we're on track to take C02 on a multi-million-year excursion, at least. We're taking the climate outside the envelope in which our species evolved... and, yes, that should be very disconcerting. We certainly should stop doing that. But whatever we do, we should absolutely make sure that we don't lose the plankton. That's got to be a higher priority than pretty much anything else.
This why I find the consideration of deep-historical and evolutionary and geological timescales useful: not to tell us that we shouldn't be worried, but to better inform us as to what, exactly, we should be worried about. What they tell us is that, on a timescale of decades, the large-scale migration and resettlement of human populations is not only survivable, but thrivable. It will be profoundly disconcerting to many people, but we did it once in the 20th century, and can do it again. It is not an existential threat to civilisation, the way it is often portrayed. Similarly, the consideration of deep time tells us that the loss of apex species and the fragmentation of ecosystems due to a rapidly-changing environment is, again, bloody disconcerting, but not an existential threat to our planet.
So we should take all of the above issues seriously, but not more seriously than something which is an existential threat to civilisation and the planet. Ocean Acidification is potentially such a threat. A future in which we save the Polar bears, save the coral reefs, save the coastal cities -- and lose the plankton -- is no future at all. That's game over for absolutely everyone. Our priorities should reflect this fact.
Combining ocean acidification, thawing tundras, and burning forests, my hunch is the climate change has already entered a positive feedback loop.
So even if we stopped anthropocentric CO2 emissions altogether, things will continue to worsen.
(I just learned about ocean methane clathrate deposits. So I may have been too optimistic.)
We'll need to sequester carbon at industrial scale to save our civilization. And figure out how to stop the non-human sources.
We've already crossed a couple of thresholds. Oyster farming in the Puget Sound, for example, now often involves moving the larvae to Hawaii so they can form their hard shell in a higher PH environment before moving them back.
http://planetsave.com/2014/07/02/ocean-fertilization-dangero...
EDIT: The article mentions that "there are also concerns that trapping CO2 at the bottom of the ocean may increase ocean acidification" so I'm not sure if this particular approach is really a solution?
> There are also concerns that trapping CO2 at the bottom of the ocean may increase ocean acidification
...However it certainly is interesting enough to warrant more research!
I think we should be experimenting with both iron fertilization (to sequester carbon and combat ocean acidification) and sulfur aerosols (for cooling). Both of these mimic natural events such as volcanic eruptions; they're not unprecedented in nature.
more like save ourselves
( paywall - your tax dollars at work !!! )
This effect of ocean acidification was incorporated into a global marine ecosystem model
Are these climate models answering more questions or raising more questions?
I hope marine communities are that adaptable. What if the species in North Carolina aren't able to move up to Boston Harbor and they all just die?
The pH is slightly moving towards neutral from an alkaline base.
I wonder if the continued use of this term by the "climate change industry" is to relay accurate scientific information or just to help increase their funding?
... which would be disastrous for a huge chunk of the ocean's ecosystem. "Acidification" seems entirely appropriate; what's the alternative you'd propose?
something something Free Market something something
If anything, the "climate change industry" as you put it are doing a piss poor job of attracting attention to something very scary.
- H. L. Mencken
That is fucking miles away. At the other end, C3 plant life goes extinct if CO2 falls below 250ppm or so? So why don't you alarmists get your knickers in a twist about that "tipping point"?? If we hadn't dug up and put some fossilized carbon back into the carbon cycle (where it bloody well came from in the first place) then we'd be facing that extinction scenario instead.
Erm no. Exhaling it is just part of the carbon cycle, it doesn't make the net level in circulation go up or down, it isn't a sink or a source... the carbon you breathe out doesn't get magicked out of thin air. It comes from the sugars, fats and protein you eat which is then burnt by your body for energy, exhaled, photosynthesized by plants, consumed by animals, and moves on up the food chain where you eat it and we start again. Round and round. That's why they call it a cycle.
Without our intervention the net amount of carbon in the cycle would continue to fall due to weathering of rocks and sequestration beneath the Earth, eventually leading to the extinction of all trees and most (non C4) plant life. Luckily, we're digging it up to restore the carbon cycle to its former glory. I think about 800ppm should be our target.
In other words, low CO2 is uphill from where we are, whereas high CO2 is downhill. And the slope is steep due to the laws of thermodynamics and chemistry.
That is fucking miles away. At the other end, C3 plant life goes extinct if CO2 falls below 250ppm or so? So why don't you alarmists get your knickers in a twist about that "tipping point"?? If we hadn't dug up and put some fossilized carbon back into the carbon cycle (where it bloody well came from in the first place) then we'd be facing that extinction scenario instead.
The pH is moving towards the acid end of the spectrum, no matter what's the current position - hence acid-ification. It's a scientific term, just open a chemistry book and read about pH.
Similarly, we say the spectrum of light undergoes a "red shift" even when there's no red in it. But I'm guessing that's also an alarmist term from the black-and-white TV industry, right? /s
As other posters have pointed out, pH is logarithmic. A 0.1 drop from ph 8.2 to 8.1 corresponds to something like a 30% increase in hydrogen ion concentration.
If your blood where to drop by 0.1 pH you'd start having seizures. (it's called Acidosis, and that's a medical term, not an alarmist term) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acidosis
I have doubt that they are going to get close to actually predicting the future environment with most of their models, since like with the temperature models they are trying to find and extrapolate seemingly-linear relationships in a very complex non-linear system, and that doesn't usually work as well as you'd like it to.
Also the subtext in the press release seems to indicate that this research will immediately be used as a political bludgeon, which I'm never a fan of. It's a shame and it reminds me of this classic cartoon: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174