Photo not part of original article.
Agence France-Presse
December 04, 2008 04:54am
“Acidity is a new, strange and unwanted development… for a whole range of marine animals,” Mark Simmonds of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society said.
Mr Simmonds, the society’s scientific director, was speaking as the UN Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species (CMS) began three days of debate on a resolution aimed at combatting ocean noise, which is caused primarily by shipping, oil and gas exploration and military sonars.
“Noisy activities are producing an acoustic fog that prevents whales from maintaining social groups, finding each other for breeding purposes, and so forth,” Mr Simmonds said.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, which is studying the rising acidity of seawater, said on its website: “As the oceans become more acidic, sounds will travel farther”, notably low-frequency sounds “used by marine mammals to find food and mates”.
Legal expert Veronica Frank of the International Fund for Animal Welfare said ocean noise has doubled each decade for the past 40 years and is expected to keep increasing.
“Blue whales’ capacity to communicate has been reduced by 90 percent,” she said.
The proposed resolution would urge the 110 parties to the CMS to mitigate the impact of ocean noise on vulnerable species, assess the environmental impact of sound-producing activities and avoid the use of high-intensity naval sonars that could pose risks for marine mammals.
The issue of ocean noise is an “international hot potato” because of the commercial and military interests involved, Mr Simmonds said.
One study found that sounds from seismic surveys using powerful airguns travelled more than 3000km from the source, the UN Environment Programme said in a communique.
Sound naturally travels farther in water than air because water has more mass.
A similar story ran back in October see here.
Cheers,
Simon
Australian Climate Madness
What is the probability of CO2 sequestration leading to carbon dioxide bubbling up into the sea and making acidification of the sea a real problem rather than an exercise in propaganda?
“GREENHOUSE gases worsen ocean noise by raising acidity”
I thought it was from all the fizzing of the CO2 bubbles.
Seriously, if they took a look at all the pure CO2 and H2S and SO2 injected directly into the water from undersea volcanoes, a few parts/million of CO2 in the air doesn’t amount to a pinch of owl scat.
A fair rule of thumb would be to add up all the CO2 and SO2 emitted by all the volcanoes on land and double it to get a general idea of the scale of the amount being injected directly into ocean water by undersea volcanoes. And considering that most spreading centers are under water and they account for a lot of the world’s volcanism, multiplying it by 4 or 5 probably wouldn’t be out of the question. In other words, while the Earth is 2/3 covered with water, probably more than 2/3 of the planet’s volcanoes are in the ocean.
Lord love us! Whatever will they dream up next?
Past geological evidence showed CO2 levels were much higher than present and life in the oceans got along just fine. So far no major anomalies in ocean pH even though CO2 atmospheric levels still rising.
My guess is this will be another data area to be rigorously suppressed.
Aren’t the acidity levels supposed to go down – rather than up – due to “all that melting of ice all over the planet”?
Well, just wondering…
Someone please explain to me why a miniscule change in pH changes the conductivity of sound in water.
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“and causing sound to travel farther, making it ever harder for marine mammals to communicate”
awe – what can I say?
OT “A step closer to self-powered kit”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7764537.stm
Thought people may find this interesting? It’s new to me.
From the article:
And the problem is …?
[OTOH, it’s not looking good for the Dodo of the Daintree.]
As Smokey pointed out, this sounds like a GOOD thing for sea animals, not bad! It means that sea animals can communicate from farther distances: Imagine taking ear mufflers off – yes, you can hear more background noise, but you can also hear noises from farther away.
Me thinks that all change is bad from AGW scare-mongering viewpoint. Never mind that change happens all the time, and we can’t stop it.
Well said Smokey! If the sound travels further how do whales become lost?
OT Read an article online by two people a while ago on Carbon Sequestration. Forgive a senior moment if I’ve mentioned this before, but one was a “scientist” & the other wasn’t. However I found the article very interesting but somewhat familiar, talking about constructing huge underground caverns specially lined to prevent the stored carbon leaching out into the ground water back to the surface & then into the atmosphere. It turned out to be familiar because I think the authors crossed out the words nuclear waste & simply substituted the word carbon instead, from an article I read around 20 years ago in an engineering journal!
So do these guys just get blank cheques and they can write in how much their research will cost? Or is it just big sack-fulls of cash with $$ or SWAG printed on the side?
I have a theory that the melting ice (caused by global warming) and subsequent desalination of the sea water is making fish drown as they are less buoyant. I will need £160Million to study this in the lab by putting a few cod in fresh water.
GREENHOUSE gases worsen ocean noise by raising acidity levels
Isn’t ocean “acidification” caused by cooler temperatures? Something about a colder ocean being able to absorb/retain more CO2? So now we’re supposed to heat the oceans to save the whales?!
“GREENHOUSE gases worsen ocean noise by raising acidity”
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This is definitely true. A freshly opened bottle of coke is always noiser than a flat one.
Whatever can be merely thought up is always possible.
What is possible is always actual.
What is actual is always an epidemic.
We must act now or we’re all dooooomed!
Water vapor being by far the most significant “greenhouse gas”, perhaps these “experts” can explain how it raises ocean acidity.
It’s truly amazing the nonsense they come up with, in order to keep the AGW/CC money spigot flowing.
Total Madness
“Blue whales’ capacity to communicate has been reduced by 90 percent,” she said.
You can’t make this stuff up!
cdl
This is better propaganda than the “AGW causes kidney stones” scam earlier this year.
This ocean propaganda piece is much harder for the typical reader to critique than the earlier scam piece, so is likely to last longer.
That it would take dramatic changes in ocean pH to change its acoustic characteristics is too complex to explain easily. That ocean Ph is not changing outside the MOE is something people have been trained to ignore by those promoting the global temps.
That an ocean that transmits sounds better might help sea mammals is not discussed.
That scientists really have no idea how sea mammals handle changes in acoustics as subtle as those being discussed is too much hard thinking for the puppet media.
I used to wonder how journalists like being propaganda puppets. I think the answer is clearly that journalists think it is completely wonderful.
And one last point:
There is not one shred of evidence that acoustic characteristics of the oceans are changing at all.
There may be more noise in the oceans due to maritime commerce, but the nature of sound in water is not changed at all, and this article offers no evidence otherwise.
Spotted this linked on Drudge, slightly related:
“EPA spokesman Nick Butterfield said the fee was proposed for farms with livestock operations that emit more than 100 tons of carbon emissions in a year and fall under federal Clean Air Act provisions.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081205/ap_on_bi_ge/farm_scene_cow_tax_2
The story stated that “ocean noise has doubled each decade for the past 40 years and is expected to keep increasing.”
Now, that may have something to do with whales etc. – while the acidity part sounds like classic AGW “science” to me. Afterall, the whole idea is to simply “link” AGW to every possible and imaginable problem there is – one way and the other – isn’t it?
How does the opinion of a LEGAL EXPERT matter to science?
“Legal expert Veronica Frank of the International Fund for Animal Welfare said ocean noise has doubled each decade for the past 40 years and is expected to keep increasing.”
Katherine, I think you are correct. If I remember my high school chemistry correctly, one of Boyle’s Laws states that the solubility of gases is inversely proportional to temperature (i.e. more CO2 would dissolve in colder water – not warmer) and acidification would increase if there was less warming.
I think future historians of science will be studying this age as we study prehistoric cultures with their rituals for appeasing the gods and the human sacrifices needed.
Or the way sociologists study the cargo cult primitives.
It must be because in order to get any grant money one has to sing the AGW mantras, and, in this particular case, one has to avoid pointing the finger at the subsonic weapons used by the military.
CO2 is the usual culprit.
So this appeared on a website. How reassuring.