The world’s marine ecosystems risk being severely damaged by ocean acidification unless there are dramatic cuts in CO2 emissions, warn scientists.
The researchers warn that ocean acidification, which they refer to as “the other CO2 problem”, could make most regions of the ocean inhospitable to coral reefs by 2050, if atmospheric CO2 levels continue to increase.
This does indeed sound alarming, until you consider that corals became common in the oceans during the Ordovician Era – nearly 500 million years ago – when atmospheric CO2 levels were about 10X greater than they are today. (One might also note in the graph below that there was an ice age during the late Ordovician and early Silurian with CO2 levels 10X higher than current levels, and the correlation between CO2 and temperature is essentially nil throughout the Phanerozoic.)
Perhaps corals are not so tough as they used to be? In 1954, the US detonated the world’s largest nuclear weapon at Bikini Island in the South Pacific. The bomb was equivalent to 30 billion pounds of TNT, vapourised three islands, and raised water temperatures to 55,000 degrees. Yet half a century of rising CO2 later, the corals at Bikini are thriving. Another drop in pH of 0.075 will likely have less impact on the corals than a thermonuclear blast. The corals might even survive a rise in ocean temperatures of half a degree, since they flourished at times when the earth’s temperature was 10C higher than the present.
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Jeff L (08:32:25) : So, if in equilibrium, at 1490 ppm atmospheric CO2, the oceans reach a ph of 7.0. Of course, based on my last post & the initial plot, CO2 ratio have been higher in the geologic past. Possible implications:
[…]
2) There are other buffering mechanisms in the ocean that keep the ph above 7.0, regardless of atmospheric CO2.
I think this is more the point…
Earlier I noted the 500 Billion tons of manganese nodules on the ocean fllor. This is an example of a chemical agent presently precipitating from solution that would react with an acid. The typical problem in aquaria is accumulation of ammonia; the CO2 will help the oceans avoid their alkaline fate…
What happens when acid rain hits rocks? Some neutralization… I would expect the same in the ocean. The fact is that CO2 does not just dissolve in the ocean, it reacts. Your calculations establish the extreme limit case, reality will be much milder…
Finally, as soon as a reacting agent hits a biological system, it is dominated by enzyme chemistry, not by simple chemistry. Somehow the AGW folks miss this. The coral will do what coral enzymes do, not what naked coral skeletons do… This isn’t a physical chemistry problem, it’s a biochemistry problem; and for that I’ll take the aquarium evidence over worry and panic from a hypothetical case…
At least somewhere the corals are growing fast:
“Scientists have reported a rapid recovery in some of the coral reefs that were damaged by the Indian Ocean tsunami four years ago.
It had been feared that some of the reefs off the coast of Indonesia could take a decade to recover.
The New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) found evidence of rapid growth of young corals in badly-hit areas.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7800796.stm
My comment above on science requiring grants missed one important group of scientists who usually do not need competitive grants. These are scientists who work for government agencies such as NIH, NASA, EPA and NOAA. So, if you want to limit valid science to people not funded by grants, you would be limiting scientific debate largerly to work by government scientists and eliminating mostly university researchers.
Of course, scientists and engineering working for corporations also do important research. However, since they are often not encouraged to publish and are often prohibited from publishing their research, it does not contribute much to scientific debates.
You have heard of evolution over there haven’t you? Corals have shown to be resiliant in geological time scales, they evolve as they adapt to the changing conditions. Like rainforests the intense competition of coral reefs man that most of the organisms function well at their optimum conditions but poorly (become less fit) once conditions stray from the optimum. It is sudden increases in sea temperatures and chemistry that cause the problems. Rapid changes will have the effect of reducing biodiversity as there will be some species that cope better with the changes (are fitter) and will reproduce more rapidly at the expense of those speciea less able to adapt to rapid changes. Once the diversity of the coral is reduced this has major effects on other marine organisms, especially fish breeding grounds.
As discussed above the properties of the coral do change as they evolve.
Bill D (14:33:58) :
Sorry I’m late in coming back to you but it was night time over here.
Obviously I cannot accept your logic. IMO it is pedantic and a lame excuse to use the more frightening and agenda driven term.
For my part I think the post above by Glenn (23:07:54) sums up exactly my feelings.
Richard Sharpe (10:00:02) :
Bill D asks an interesting question:
Do you assume that medical science, for example is equally unreliable?
H pylori?
And many others. Which is why after a long and sometimes shoddy history the medical field adopted very strict methods. The state of ‘climate science’ is worse than that of medicine back when they were having folks stand in puddles with magnets and sniff ether. And it needs the same formal discipline.
Help me understand what is going on here. I like to understand all the causal chains. Perhaps I have one of the links wrong.
So you are looking for the missing link 😎
CO2 is not going to react with a living system the same way it reacts with rocks. While there will be some acid / base neutralization inorganic chemistry going on, the wild card is all those millions of square kilometers of enzyme studded surface area on zillions of algae and microbes. There is just no way you can predict how that will turn out.
Also, on the issue of speed of change: I’ve set up more aquariums than I car to think about. The key thing is the bacteria. At first the pH goes way alkaline as the ammonia builds up, then various bacteria get established and it all settles down. In about 3 weeks. Same thing will happen with CO2. It is a scarce and rate limiting nutrient for plants. As soon as it starts rising into ‘abundant’ range in the ocean there will be a ‘bloom’ of plants and bacteria to suck it out. And never underestimate the pH adjusting power of bacterial soup…
Frankly, all I see so far is yet another research area dancing in the error bands of measurement. We have a pH that is 8.x where x can bounce around quite a bit in normal oceans. Now there is a claim of the sky falling because someone measured something somewhere and calculated a 0.1 pH unit drop? This is just silly. More averages of averages playing in the error band. Sound and fury signifying nothing.
Think the pH doesn’t change when a fish pees or poops on a coral? Where are all the white spots from this assault? How about all the acidity when the sun goes down and all those hosted algae start emitting CO2 instead of absorbing it? The corals respire. In and out. The pH at the surface is not going to be unaffected by this.
Mary Hinge: Rapid changes will have the effect of reducing biodiversity as there will be some species that cope better with the changes (are fitter) and will reproduce more rapidly at the expense of those speciea less able to adapt to rapid changes.
The planet has had many rapid climate changes in its past and the ultimate outcome seems a continuing increase in both the biodiversity and the skills of its inhabitants.
Coral bleaching is caused by warming sea temps?….not exactly. There are many causes, and the major cause is a sudden change in sea temperature up or down.
Not something generally associated with the AGW process, but more a part of the natural ENSO cycle. This is just another example of twisting the facts to suit a cause. Might be time to look at some facts.
Here is a marine Biology report that states:
“Coral species live within a relatively narrow temperature margin, and anomalously low and high sea temperatures can induce coral bleaching. Bleaching events occur during sudden temperature drops accompanying intense upwelling episodes, (-3 degrees C to –5 degrees C for 5-10 days), seasonal cold-air outbreaks. Bleaching is much more frequently reported from elevated se water temperature. A small positive anomaly of 1-2 degrees C for 5-10 weeks during the summer season will usually induce bleaching.”
http://www.marinebiology.org/coralbleaching.htm
On the Great Barrier Reef there is no indication of the oceans warming.
http://mclean.ch/climate/GBR_sea_temperature.htm
Horseshoe crab – this little bugger was crawling around the shallow coastal oceans at least 100 million years before the dinosaurs arrived. Climate changes, he has been there done that.
Floor Anthoni mentions that ocean upwelling brings stored deep water co2 to the surface making places like the Galapogos and Monterey Bay the most “acidic” parts of the ocean. These are also the most productive food locations in the seas.
Strange – I spent the better part of three hours trying to find a quoted figure for ocean pH in Monterey Bay. It’s hidden like a national defence secret – better even because the New York Times hasn’t even leaked it.
You would think that the Monterey Aquarium, USC Monterey Bay, the National Marine Sancuary with NOAA monitoring water quality 24/7, that somewhere among that seathing cesspool of climate change and ocean acid propaganda, that there would be at least one person who dipped a pH meter in the water.
It says something I think. about the results that they are not mentioned {at least anywhere I can find}.
It shows religious ferver.
Also there are plenty of pristine corals in the Monterey Bay, 4,100 to 12,000 (1250 to 3660 meters) below the ocean surface. Because they’re so deep a comprehensive survey of the various species hasn’t been done.
Here are the best pictures.
Papertiger:
here is Monterey Bay Aquarium Incoming Seawater pH Spot Measurements during 1994 – 2007. No bad news here so maybe it is not news. pH increased from about 7.85 in 1996 to about 8.05 at the end of 2006 (if I read the data correctly).
http://sanctuarymonitoring.org/regional_docs/monitoring_projects/100240_167.pdf
Fascinating topic. This was the one part of global warming I was at all worried about, as I didn’t know anything about it. Still don’t but it seems less worrisome.
Alan Wilkinson (00:51:23) :
Bill D (23:01:37) : [in scientific debates] only peer reviewed publications really count
Twaddle. The only thing peer reviewed publications matter for is academic promotion. Most of them are never read by anyone except their authors.
What matters in scientific debates is understanding how and why things work. Brains and honest and diligent studies are what count and it doesn’t matter a fig how the results are disseminated.
Alan–I assume that you do not publish in science. You are mistaken on this one. What are the altenatives to publishing in a legitimate scientifiic journal?
I can post my research on the internet, present it at a scientific meeting, send copies of a manuscript to experts, write it up in a thesis, or perhaps put it in a government report. In all of these cases, the research will be largely ignored by the scientific community, it will not be cited by other scientists in their work and it will be soon forgotten by everyone, probably in a year or less.
If I publish in a scientific journal, the work will be read, discussed and cited by other scientists. If the work is important it will be read by graduate students training in the field. In any case, it will be listed on search engines such as google scholar.
When I go to meeting and institutions around the world, scientists who don’t know me personally know who I am by my journal publications. For example, right now I am working at a research institution in Europe for six months and this morning I was introduced to several young scientists working in my field who were familiar with publications that are relevant to their experiments.
As Alan correctly points out, many peer reviewed articles are hardly read or cited. The best work is well cited by other scientists. For example, when you
do a search on http://scholar.google.com/
Try searching under “coral bleaching” and the first paper listed is by O. Hoegh-Guldberg (1999). Toward to bottom of the entry you can learn that this paper was cited by 722 other scientific articles. Click on this link to get a list of the 722 articles. Reading a portion of the 722 articles will give an idea why this paper by Hoegh-Guldberg is considered so important by other scientists. One can assume that anyone interested in coral bleaching should be very familiar with this paper (which you can download as a PDF). It is also listed first by Google because it is well cited and influencial.
Most scientific papers are not influencial and are only cited by a handful of other articles. You can be sure that a paper cited by over 700 other papers is very important. It takes a while for a scientific paper to accumulate citations. If you disagree with conclusions of a scientific paper, you can check out whether and how the paper has been cited by other scientists. Do their results contradict or support this earlier study?
“Ocean Acidification” is just one more in the long line of Climate-Speak, which are (mostly) 2-word phrases invented for the sole purpose of propagandizing the AGW ideology, and keeping people in an alarmed state, including the following: climate chaos, climate disruption, climate catastrophe, climate emergency, climate criminal, carbon pollution, carbon footprint, ecological footprint, and terracide.
If you can control the language, you control thought to a great degree.
“E.M.Smith (18:09:27) :
Any tropical underwater volcano growing corals?
Nothing like an existance proof if you can find it.”
*Raises hand*… Um the Hawaiian islands. If it werent for volcanic activity creating the islands the ocean would be too deep to support coral growth and since each island is “built” from the ocean floor to the surface (tallest mtn on earth) creating places for the coral to grow, Id say thats pretty good proof of a tropical underwater volcano growing corals..
Does it seem strange to anyone but me that they measure Co2 near a live volcano? What a curious world we live in.
PS I too own a reef tank and while it has an optimal temp range, growth of corals depend more on the chemistry of the water, light and circulation. Our system does not have a cooler so in the summertime at times the temp of my tank is higher than it should be by a degree or two, it has yet to bleach my pretty coral and I have a population that is quickly outgrowing my tank.
The Bikini “Castle Bravo” 15 Megaton was at the time the worlds largest, but since then the Russians have tested far larger weapons, like the “Tsar” more than 3 times the power 8 years later.
As far as coral, it is and will be fine.
From a different corner, the Christian Science Monitor:
How air imperils the sea
Continue ;D
nobwainer (Geoff Sharp) (02:39:15)
Geoff: You state that the temperature has been stable in the Great Barrier Reef and link to graphs that show only small changes.
If you look at the O. Hoegh-Guldburg (1998) paper that I mention above, on page 24 (I think) you can learn that 1998 experienced the warmest SST (sea surface temperatures) in the 95 years of instrumental data at the Great Barrier Reef. You can also learn that 1998 saw the biggest coral bleaching and die off that had been recorded up to that time. This does not look a much of a temperature change, but a one or two degree increase can be enough to cause a coral die-off. Many readers of this blog probably know that 1998 was a very warm year in many places on earth.
Added note: The Hoegh-Guldberg (1998) paper is listed as a “book” and is available as a doc file not a PDF or a journal article as I state above. Most other papers under “coral bleaching” are journal articles.
All a question of time scales, the immediate time frame, for instance the human life span) diversity will be greatly reduced. In the longer time frame, (100,000’s of years ) then you’re right. care to wait that long?
“Steven Goddard (19:28:25) :
I’m not trying to construct an argument that corals or shellfish can survive in acidic water. Because they can’t.”
I think you are misinformed here. Lately some deep dives have been discovering life that depends on deep ocean volcanic vents. To quote from the dive record in the link on the 2nd picture of the dive summary: Closeup of tube worms and long neck barnacles that colonize volcanic vents on the seafloor. They live by metabolising the hot, acidic, mineral laden fluids being pumped out of the vents.
http://data.gns.cri.nz/hazardwatch/2004/10/nz-scientist-explores-underwater.html
Isnt Nature marvelous:)
Bruce Cobb (05:36:20) :
as in Newspeak?
Alan wilkinson said
“This is a misrepresentation of the basic chemistry.
There are two aqueous dissociation constants involved:
(1) H2CO3 ← K1 → H+ & HCO3- ← K2 → 2H+ & CO3–
as well as the solubility reaction involving Henry’s Law at the surface:
(2) H20 + CO2 ← Ks → H2CO3
Adding more CO2 to the sea whether by increasing atmospheric CO2 or by cooling the water which modifies Ks can only drive equation 1 to the right, increasing the amount of CO3– in the water.
Likewise, increasing the amount of CO3– in the water (by dissolving Calcium Carbonate can only drive equation (1) to the left (incidentally making the water more alkaline.)
In this scenario the only way the ocean can be made more acidic without also increasing carbonate concentrations is to remove the carbonate by forming more shells and coral, not less.
So the alarmists are actually complaining that the increased coral and shell productivity over the last two centuries is going to slow down because of the decreased alkalinity it has caused. That is the real message of Feeny et al., in basic chemistry stripped of its spin.”
The story told by the experts in this field is
http://ioc3.unesco.org/oanet/FAQacidity.html
“When CO2 dissolves in seawater, carbonic acid is produced via the reaction:
This carbonic acid dissociates in the water, releasing hydrogen ions and bicarbonate:
The increase in the hydrogen ion concentration causes an increase in acidity, since acidity is defined by the pH scale, where pH = -log [H+] (so as hydrogen increases, the pH decreases). This log scale means that for every unit decrease on the pH scale, the hydrogen ion concentration has increased 10-fold.
One result of the release of hydrogen ions is that they combine with any carbonate ions in the water to form bicarbonate:
This removes carbonate ions from the water, making it more difficult for organisms to form the CaCO3 they need for their shells. ”
A more detailed exposition of the Chemistry can be found at
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=169
“The pH of seawater is buffered by the chemistry of carbon, just as is the chemistry of blood and cellular fluids. The buffering action arises from the fact that the concentrations of the various carbon species are much higher than is the concentration of H+ ions. If some process tries to add or remove H+ ions, the amount of H+ ions required will be determined by the amount of the carbon species that have to be converted from one form to another. This will be an amount much higher than the actual change in H+ concentration itself.
Most of the carbon in seawater is in the form of HCO3-, while the concentrations of CO32- and dissolved CO2 are one and two orders of magnitude lower, respectively. The equilibrium reaction for CO2 chemistry in seawater that most cogently captures its behavior is
CO2 + CO32- + H2O == 2 HCO3-
where I am using double equal signs as double arrows, denoting chemical equilibrium. Since this is a chemical equilibrium, Le Chatlier’s principal states that a perturbation, by say the addition of CO2, will cause the equilibrium to shift in such a way as to minimize the perturbation. In this case, it moves to the right. The concentration of CO2 goes up, while the concentration of CO32- goes down. The concentration of HCO3- goes up a bit, but there is so much HCO3- that the relative change in HCO3- is smaller than the changes are for CO2 and CO32-. It works out in the end that CO2 and CO32- are very nearly inversely related to each other, as if CO2 times CO32- equaled a constant. “
Bill D (05:30:49) :
do a search on http://scholar.google.com/
Try searching under “coral bleaching” and the first paper listed is by O. Hoegh-Guldberg (1999). Toward to bottom of the entry you can learn that this paper was cited by 722 other scientific articles. Click on this link to get a list of the 722 articles.
I would like to find that paper but I cannot use Google (company policy).
Could you please just give me the publisher, ie. Science.mag or Elshivier etc.
Thanks.
Bill D is still at it:
So, how is this increase in temperature (which I believe is nicely explained by a couple of natural things) related to human produced CO2 and acidification?
Those two things are really the topic of this thread, no matter how much you want to derail the thread.
Here is a passage from Bill D’s
most cited peer reviewed paper.
Like their terrestrial counterparts -rainforests- coral reefs are
being endangered by a diverse range of human-related threats.
Eutrophication and increased sedimentation flowing from dis-
turbed terrestrial environments, over-exploitation of marine
species, mining and physical destruction by reef users are the
main causes of reef destruction (Sebens 1994). Mass coral bleaching™ is yet another major contributing factor to decline of coral reefs.
Although reef building corals are not likely to not become extinct in the long term, their health and distribution will be severely compromised for many hundreds of years unless warming is mit-
igated. The implications of this ‚future™ are enormous and
should be avoided with all the resources at our disposal.
We just found out that rainforests aren’t all that endangered, and that biologists were keeping it hush hush.
Eutrophication – I looked that up and it means pumping sewage into rivers.
Not good but not climate change either. And it’s the city county muni governments who are our primary polluters. Whens the last time you heard of a pol saying that? It’s easy to mouth the climate change mantra but do something real like modernize sewers which is one of the basic government functions anyhow? Congressman Doolittle was setting up small scale tests of various new water treatment plants. But he got kneecapped by the SAC Bee and decided not to run again. Besides Doolittle I haven’t heard anything more concrete then “Where are all the Salmon?” from the other pols.
Global warming isn’t a factor.