Don’t laugh, that’s what the Geological Society of America is pushing these days to describe the “ocean acidification problem”…from their press release:
Earth on Acid: The Present & Future of Global Acidification
GSA Annual Meeting & Exposition, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, 4–7 November 2012
Boulder, CO, USA – Climate change and extreme weather events grab the headlines, but there is another, lesser known, global change underway on land, in the seas, and in the air: acidification.
It turns out that combustion of fossil fuels, smelting of ores, mining of coal and metal ores, and application of nitrogen fertilizer to soils are all driving down the pH of the air, water, and the soil at rates far faster than Earth’s natural systems can buffer, posing threats to both land and sea life.
“It’s a bigger picture than most of us know,” says Janet Herman of the Department of Environmental Sciences at University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Herman and her colleague, Karen Rice of the USGS, discovered that despite the fact that they worked on different kinds of acidification in the environment, they were not well informed about the matter beyond their own specialties. So they have done an extensive review of science papers about all kinds of environmental acidification and are presenting their work in a poster session on Tuesday, 6 Nov., at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA.
Acidification is both a local and global problem, since it can be as close as a nearby stream contaminated by mine tailings or as far-reaching as the world’s oceans, which are becoming more acidic as sea water absorbs higher concentrations of carbon dioxide that humans dump into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
Coal gives a double whammy by being the biggest contributor of anthropogenic carbon dioxide to the global atmosphere as well as creating regional acidification. Coal burning is famous for creating acid rain, which had dramatic environmental impacts on forests, streams, and lakes in eastern North America and Europe and led to major policy changes.
“It’s not at all clear that other regions are considering such policy restrictions to be important,” Herman says, regarding places where population growth is expected to increase acidifying activities.
Normally, acids in the environment are buffered by alkaline compounds released by the weathering of minerals in rocks. The problem today, according to Herman, is that the rate of acidification by human activities has outstripped the weathering rate and buffering capacity of the planet.
In their work, Herman and Rice look at the population projections by country over the next four decades to see where the increased industrialization and agriculture will likely lead to new acidification hot spots. Their hope is that by doing this people can anticipate the problem and plan to mitigate the harmful environmental effects, says Herman.
WHAT: Acidification of Earth: An Assessment across Mechanisms and Scales
WHEN: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Tuesday, 6 Nov.
WHERE: Booth #67, Charlotte Convention Center: Hall B
ABSTRACT: https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2012AM/finalprogram/abstract_207495.htm
Source: http://www.geosociety.org/news/pr/12-89.htm
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Is this another first…a POSTER that is so important, it warrants its own press release?
ps usually “posters” aren’t even CV material. Perhaps post-normal science looks at them differently.
Are there any numbers in the study, like measured ph of soil, oceans (by local areas), or any other quantification of the situation outlined in the abstract?
I thought that the solubility of a gas decreased with a rise in temperature (the opposite of a solid!). So, AGW is making the planet including the oceans warmer, therefore less CO2 is soluble, therefore a decrease in carbonic acid, with a consequent increase in pH.
Is my science wrong, or is the warmists case of having your cake and eating it, still prevalent?
So with the only papers on acidification of the oceans being put out by the hysterical fringe, who have grabbed onto this and extreme weather in the face of their CO2 scares crumbling, do you think you could have found otherwise? Surely if were talking about science there should have been some observation actual numbers – the worst they’ve got is a pH of a tenth or thereabouts lower than the (highly variable) ocean values that have been recorded for a century or so.
Do the people that employ these merchants of doom take any notice of what their employees are saying? Do they realize that when the inevitable incarceration of certifiable loons happens, they may end up with them?
Was Dr. Timothy Leary a co-author?
“the world’s oceans, which are becoming more acidic as sea water absorbs
higher concentrations of carbon dioxide that humans dump into the
atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.”
Really? The oceans hold 100 times (two orders of magnitude) the mass of the
atmosphere. The oceans are alkaline (CO2 + H2O -> H3O+ & HCO2- and
even to CO3–) from the CO2 absorbed. The oceans are self regulating,
emitting CO2 when temperatures rise and absorbing CO2 when temperatures
fall—the world-famous soft-drink bottle effect (just add and remove refrigeration
to see it),
I remember reading somewhere (perhaps here at WUWT?) that most of the
rise in CO2 in our atmosphere can be easily accounted for as oceanic
emissions, not human. I interpret this as meaning the oceans regulate the
atmosphere—and its CO2 content— not vice versa.
The “acid rain” problem which we experienced in the past was caused by the
sulphur content of the coal being burnt. Smoke-stack scrubbers were introduced
to cut/reduce the sulphur oxides being emitted. If scrubbers are not present in
Chinese and Indian coal-burning plants, then that could be a problem.
But CO2? Nah …
Taking the long view, there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between CO2 and temperature.
How predictable and boring. There is a lack of rigor in the OA movement (you know, lack of evidence, lack of understanding of how large the ocean is, ocean chemistry, and biochemistry, etc.). This strongly infers that large doses of 1960’s era acid are influencing what passes for thinking in these latest fear mongers.
To andrewmharding: you are right, there would be a slight decrease in CO2 solubility, but that is overshadowed by the increase of CO2, and the partial pressure balance between CO2 in the air and in the water. The bigger issue is, what is the harm, is it huge or do sea creatures overall tend to manage it well. Matt Ridley has blogged extensively at The Rational Optimist on the issue, and suggests the latter is the case. Here are some links:
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-threat-from-ocean-acidification-is-greatly-exaggerated.aspx
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/acid-oceans-and-acid-rain.aspx
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/victory-on-acidification!.aspx
It’s worse than we fart…
The world just keeps on ending. And fools keep on blindly parroting. And money just keeps on flowing to another black hole of fear… Ugh.
Some people never outgrow Halloween in their personal development. Acidification of the oceans is the next CO2 bugaboo, if they can ever get this thing inflated to the point where it will float. They have been trying for years, huffing and puffing, but the idea that we shall turn the ocean into a giant soda beverage has yet to take hold in the public imagination. Their hope never dies, and their strength is they don’t care if they appear ridiculous. We should not mind for it is comic relief, like cattle farts and methane.
It’s late evening for me and I don’t have time to look stuff up but this smells of more overblown bullshit scaremongering. I feel for the poor dinosaurs who were wiped out by high co2 and acid – everywhere – while life thrived left, right and centre.
Yeah I’m back but now going to bed. I can’t let these scammers get away with their crap. Ocean acidification is meaningless on Earth or should that be good for the Earth?
I believe this is the shifting goalposts again. The crisis of tomorrow will go from “CO2 is causing runaway global warming” to “CO2 is causing runaway ocean acidification”.
Spare us more melodramatic catastrophy being dished up by usual thespians. Moving right along from the hackneyed and insulting ‘denier’ association, the resident implication in the title so artfully -sarc- used by Janet Herman of the Department of Environmental Sciences at University of Virginia is the association with LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide), and disagreement with the thesis being the risk of being labeled a hallucinating, junkie?
A couple of hours north of where I live (northern Japan) is a stream draining off an active volcano. The water is pH 1.5. In the west, I guess it would be treated as some kind of biohazard. In Japan, it makes a very nice outdoor bath (rotenburo), complete with waterfall. The water does feel slightly oily though, and after 1/2 hour or so of broiling, ones fingerprints start to diappear.
This is Whack-a-Moley science. No sooner does the CO2 and CAGW dross get whacked than they take their CO2 and come up with higher growth of plants is not good because of the water they require, or it causes shark attackes, or it acidifies the ocean, kills the coral, increases red tides….
If a person believed even a fraction of the alarmist hysteria,…..
It is no wonder anti-depressant sales are through the roof !!
GRANGEVILLE, Idaho —
“Crop soils in north-central Idaho are becoming more acidic, possibly because . . .”
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2015122971_apidacidicsoil1stldwritethru.html
~~~~~~~~
I’ve tried growing blueberries a couple of times with poor results. They need an acidic soil, less common in a dry area such as where I live. Local irrigation water has minerals so all the effort of amending the soil can be lost unless rain water is available.
Two points, then: Some local problems exist in the ocean waters as they do on land. Best to treat them as local problems if treating them is necessary. On land – grow blueberries. They are good for you.
Acid rain is very 80’s, feels very retro mann, maybe it’s time to study!
Even Satan is ripping up the contract they signed with him at birth.
I was a member of GSA at one time, have attended a number of sessions over the years and given a talk or two. This is the first time I have ever seen a press release about anything to do with a GSA conference let alone a poster session. Good God man. When you go to the really classy Geo meetings (AAPG as an example) you get mostly pretty high end posters but also some cheesy crap. At meetings like the GSA it is more like the opposite. If I were either of these researchers I would be cowering in embarrassment. Hey I did a literature review of X topic and now I need to press release my findings! What next?
It I my understanding that there is 50 times as much CO2 in the ocean than the atmosphere. Even if all of the post start of the industrial age CO2 suddenly ended up in the ocean, this would increase ocean CO2 by less than 1%.
I notice that some of the usual posters have gone off into all sorts of what appears to be a broad-front CO2 conspiracy theory commentary that has nothing to do with the paper which is a systemic overview of acidification (or Ph reduction) processes.
Having been a farmer I can confirm from personal experience that reductions in soil pH are a generic outcome of many modern agricultural processes and inputs. For most crops, the reduction in pH tends to reduce productivity. That is why farmers lime their paddocks. This is not exactly rocket science and it is certainly not a CO2 plot by some sneaky scientists.
In other cases, drainage (particularly of coastal plains) may expose acid sulphate and mobilise acidity that was previously sequestered. Again, not rocket science.
Neither of these processes are necessarily-related to CO2 emissions.
Another poster has already commented on acid rain sourced from burning high sulfur-content coal and correctly pointed out that scrubbers have drastically reduced this impact.
My suggestion: rather than respond with axiomatic CO2 conspiracy theory blather, treat the paper with proper scientific respect, read it closely and then comment.
Yawn… They are clearly sifting through papers that have measured pH levels from obvious places that use fertilizers, which would be agricultural, that would be to exacerbate the human influence on a non issue. I call Bat Crap on this one! pun intended.