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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BBC ? that’s what happens when drug addicts mix Heroin and Cocaine and fantasize, and the British Tax payer accepts this ?( doing a search on Google news it looks like the only British workers (tax payers) are Foreigners.)
Code Tech. (00.57.09)
Thanks for the math, even with a plus minus to the power of 20 it still looks good!
OT:
I had no idea that sea level rise was causing so many problems:
“As sea levels rise and world weather patterns worsen, flooding has become a major cause of rice crop loss. Scientists estimate 4 million tons of rice are lost every year because of flooding. That’s enough rice to feed 30 million people.”
From CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/01/29/waterproof.rice/index.html
Amazing how they manage to insert little snipits like that…
So is it the flooding?…or the sea level rise?…how much of each?
JimB
Andrew McRae (00:50:11) :
“Personally I think that since CO2 has a higher solubility in warmer water than cooler water, and since the satellite measurements (MMU) of the SST have definitely shown (via e.g. CRU) the surface warmed between 1991 and 2006, this would mean the ocean would have sucked in more CO2 even if atmospheric CO2 concentration had stayed the same between 1991 and 2006. All they’ve done is build a million dollar thermometer – not an AGW fingerprint detective.”
Its the other way around on the CO2 solubility in water.
Here is a famous picture from Hiroshima of the shadow of a person and ladder burned onto a wall, which was undamaged from the shock wave.
http://history.independence.co.jp/ww2/raid/h02.jpg
It had to have been quite far away from ground zero, and had to have received huge amounts of radiative heat.
My belief is that nuclear proliferation in the Middle East is far more dangerous than a few tens of PPM of extra CO2, but apparently that is not in tune with the current thinking of the best minds in Washington, London and Brussels.
No doubt man’s activities have had a serious impact on the ocean. Instead of wasting endless amounts of money, time political will and “brainpower” focusing on CO2, why not concentrate on the pollutants and activities which are actually doing the damage? Corals and shellfish thrived in the oceans with CO2 levels much higher than at the present.
One of the first things that Geology students are taught in their freshman year is that the solubility of CO2 in seawater decreases as ocean temperatures rise. It is unfortunate that some climate scientists never learned this, as they might have avoided wasting their time trying to invert the interpretation of ice cores.
This is only “Climate Change” marketing, it is not about any scientific reasoning whatsoever. It is just a political issue. Fortunately nature does not follow our wishes. They will not succeed in changing the laws of nature.
Every chemical compound reaches an equilibrium state, say an end state, the one for CO2 is calcium carbonate (chalk, marble,etc.)
For sure, some day, in the future, our grandchildrens, will find AGW´rs bones in a phosphates field….
Neven,
As I said earlier, the onus is on the people making the claims that a 0.1 drop in pH over a century or so will be catastrophic to corals and shellfish. I don’t know how to construct an argument against arm waving speculation, other than to point out again that CO2 levels were much, much higher in the past – and the oceans were teaming with life.
Smokey – I guess you have in mind the Dimmock vs ‘Inconvenient Truth’ court case [point 9]. The judge actually found that attribution of bleaching solely to GW was unsupportable. Its particularly hard to understand the judicial thought processes on this one as the movie makes exactly the same point.
I am not sure that a law court is the optimal forum to determine the merit of a scientific argument: apparently the judge agreed: It was essential to appreciate that the hearing before me did not relate to an analysis of the scientific questions
Richard Sharpe (21:45:26) :
“I am also lead to believe that the current corrals and the ones before the KT event (I believe) were different, one being rugose corals and the other not.”
Many of the modern reef-building and non-reefal coral species were also present in the Cretaceous or had similar mineralogy as the Cretaceous corals.
The losses of coral reefs worldwide over the last 30 years or so are attributed to “coral bleaching” which means that corals lose their algal symbionts and then die. Google Scholar lists over 15,000 hits on the key words “coral bleaching” and the first two articles are available free as PDF’s. These articles show that the bleaching events are linked to “warming events.” That is, high peak ocean surface temperatures. Of course, the corals don’t care about the warming events are human-caused or “natural.” If the ocean temperatures stay the same or continue to warm, most or all of the world’s coral reefs will die off in the current century. If the oceans cool, the coral reefs should be able to recover unless acidification (decline in pH) causes them to die off.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=coral+bleaching&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search
Anyone interested in debating or discussing the decline in coral reefs should read at least a few of these articles.
A while back I read an article originally from the NYT about experiments on ocean acidification. The original experiments where done by adding carbonic acid directly to what was basically a large salt water aquarium. Result: Corals started to die.
Some researchers decided to make the experiments a little more like the real world. Instead of adding acid, they bubbled CO2 into the water. Result: Algae growth accelerated which in turn created byproducts that coral needed to grow. The sea water became more acidic, but life blossomed in the aquarium (including the corals).
I can’t recall all the details and haven’t been able to find a copy of the article yet.. :+(
John Philip (04:51:14) :
“mass bleaching events, triggered by warmer waters that present the main threat” ……
“these concerns have been vindicated by the increasing frequency and intensity of mass coral bleaching events, particularly in 1998 when approximately 16% of the world’s reefs were functionally destroyed,…”
1998 was the record El Nino year – ie massive warm waters. You aren’t suggesting that event was human caused as well??? I think we can all agree that was a natural event, thus so was that bleaching event.
“Caribbean reefs were also subjected to 26 named storms, including 13 hurricanes in 2005. ”
…. I suggest you read up on Dr. Bill Gray’s work on hurricanes – there is no statistical correlation between temperatures & # of or intensity of tropical disturbances. Also see the work of Nolan & Rappin (2008) which says there should be no correlation – because increasing shear in the warmer atmosphere offsets the increasing potential energy of the water- just as is observed. Here’s a layman’s link to that research:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080812160615.htm
“Pervasive overfishing, pollution, coastal development, and physical damage further undermine reef health”
These are all defensible problems that are caused by mankind – but they have nothing to do with CO2 or acidification. Stick to the arguments that are defensible and you will be better off.
As a society, the use of non-defensible agruments, especially by those who know better, is a huge problem. You can see where this will lead. With time, this whole AGW hypothesis will unspool, but the general public, who doesnt have the time or interest to learn what is going on, will likely throw the baby out with the bath water. In other words, there are legitimate environmental issues that should be a concern (such as overfishing, pollution, etc), but if burned by the AGW scam, the general public will look at ALL environmental science as a scam and dismiss it all, which will be bad for society. If protection of the environment is truly the goal of the AGW camp (and not a socialistic political agenda, as many would suggest), then they need to realize that , in the end, they may achieve the exact opposite of what they are setting out to do. As a citizen that does care about the environment – as I spend most of my spare time recreating outdoors – the whole situation is a very sad state of affairs.
Mike Young (05:13:05) :
By the way, what happened to the acid rain scare years ago? Was that “solved” or did we just move on to another more scary scare?
Mike–regulation of the release of SO2 when burning coal has significantly improved the acid rain situation. Many lakes in northern New York, the Canadian shield and Scandanavia are still acidic from human-caused acid rain, but the overall situation is better. Rain fall down wind from coal burning and dense human populations is still more acid than “natural rain” but the situation is improved. Good studies on recovery from acidification come for the Sudbury, Ontaria region, where massive and local acid rain caused by smelting ore was stopped allowing a slow recovery of the lake food chains.
Neil Crafter (23:13:31) : “The use of the term “acidification” is scary to the average punter. The effect is to make the oceans very slightly less alkaline, but that term does not have the right scare factor for the AGW scarists. ”
You are absolutely correct. While “acidification” may be technically correct, I believe is was a conscious effort to scare the average joe. I believe if you ask most people on the street they will tell you that first thing the word “acid” brings to mind is flesh disolving liquids that kill everything.
I also believe the average joe thinks higher PH means more acidic. This is probably due to usually referring to things as more/less acidic and rarely referring to them as more/less basic; therefore they then make the incorrect conclusion that the words “more acidic” equate to “more PH”.
Supposedly before Industrialization the atmospheric CO2 content varied during Glacial periods and Inter-Glacial periods from as low as about 180ppm during Glacial periods and up to 280ppm during Inter-Glacial periods. The difference in atmospheric CO2 levels was supposedly to a large degree caused by the amount of CO2 the world’s oceans could contain under the existing conditions, the so called “out gassing”. So when earth temperature increases, oceans are less able to contain CO2 and CO2 causes more warming, but increased CO2 in the atmosphere increases the CO2 in the oceans… I am having a Vinnie Barbarino moment here! I am confused.
I haven’t read all the comments yet and may not have time, but I wanted to suggest that perhaps loss of coral reefs might be due to excess nitrogen and sedimentation, and even disease rather than CO2.
I mean Occam’s Razor and all that.
Mark
OK, so some sub-editor at BBC Online turned “relative acidification” into “acid” to save space and increase shock value, not much news there. The comparison with geological history is spurious (actually, somewhat confirmatory to the danger) because we are talking about different species. I can’t fathom any possible relevance to short-term effects of, and recovery from, a nuclear blast. Not much left, then.
This issue isn’t in the same class as the somewhat debatable (at least in scale) CO2->temperature link, which starts from a basic physical premise at the low end but requires theoretical models and large forward feedbacks to reach the wilder predicted catastrophic levels. The loss of corals seems to stem from simple, well-understood chemistry and biology, and most importantly, is actually being observed. Thanks to Bill D and John Philip for explaining this in measured terms.
Sorry, folks, and Anthony in particular, but I find this site – particularly in some of the guest posts – is drifting from what seemed to be a genuine concern for measurement accuracy and lets-check-it-ourselves popular science towards reactive, anti-all-environmentalism point-scoring. If that’s Anthony’s wish (which I seriously doubt, actually), that’s his privilege, of course, but I’m afraid the change may leave some of the former audience behind.
John Philip
Firstly, acidification is only one way to describe it, neutralization is more correct and reduced alkalinity is yet another way – equally worrying to any ocean researchers. Acidification is simply the scary way – and my discussion with the author of that Wikipedia article (as JG17) proved beyond all doubt that the use of the word acidification was entirely a political decision, not a scientific one. When I requested the addition of the comment in the article about the sea still actually being alkaline – as per the pH scale we all learnt in high school chemistry, one of his return comments was:
“it’s unclear exactly who would feel misled other than someone who hasn’t a basic grasp of chemistry.”
Well clearly the BBC reporter didn’t have that necessary basic grasp of chemistry. And reporters inform the general public. He was quite simply misinformed and it wasn’t by accident but by design. Acid sea, factually incorrect as it is, is design to shock and the word “acidification” led him to incorrectly believe that the sea was acid. It’s pure propaganda.
I’d like to see the study that says bleaching is caused by acidity. Traditionally bleaching is caused by excess alkalinity. So acidity is not necessarily the first thing you might think about wrt bleaching. It could be fertilizer runoff to mention just one rather more likely candidate.
The reference to the Caribbean is good as far as it goes, but they completely fail to mention that the coral in Cuba is utterly pristine – as reported several times in National Geographic, latterly by the late Peter Benchley. Why pristine? Mostly because Castro doesn’t allow fishing boats there, plus some basic environmental protection measures. So the case against CO2 in the Caribbean falls apart completely when you consider Cuba. A mere error of omission? Unlikely because every marine biologist knows about Cuba’s coral, so it is almost certainly another deliberately political misrepresentation for propaganda purposes – likely in order to encourage funding.
So why is it important to be factually correct and precise with respect to the evidence against CO2 or acidification “stress” if the main aim is to get funding to improve things? Well, as others have said, there are very good reasons to worry about the real causes of ocean degradation, and they are usually human in cause too; fishing, runoff etc. Yet how do we begin to stop this pollution of the seas, which is most certainly far more dastardly and imminent than some imaginary “stress” caused by CO2, if those polluters are allowed and even encouraged to shift the blame to CO2 and then continue happily polluting?
Ted Annonson (00:34:11) on the three salesmen:
1. So the logic error occurs when adding the $2 to the $27, because the $2 is part of the $27. The $2 should be added to the $25 that is in the clerk’s hands. Alternatively, if one asked how much money does each party have at given fixed times and applying the Conservation of Money principle:
a) Before any transactions:
3 salesman $30.00
Clerk …….. $0.00
bellboy…… $0.00
b) After 1st transaction:
3 salesman (now broke) …. $0.00
Clerk ………………………… $30.00
bellboy………………………… $0.00
c) After 2nd transaction:
3 salesman (still broke) …………………………… $0.00
Clerk … (Now 2nd guessing his compassion)… $25.00
bellboy… (Now Rich) …………………………………$5.00
d) After last transaction;
3 salesman (Thinking, what an idiot that Clerk was)…………..$3.00
Clerk … (Now banging his head against the wall) ………………$25.00
bellboy… (2nd guessing giving the salesman any of the $5)…..$2.00
2. In CO2 world, the equivalent is adding 2 bits of CO2 to 27 bits of Air and Ocean (= 7.407…percent), when it’s for all practical purposes already part of it.
3. Miraculously, CodeTech (00:57:09) numbers are in very close agreement with the salesman story. From Code Tech; Anthropogenic CO2 annual emissions are 7/90 = 7.8 percent of the Air + Ocean annual exchange.
4. Since 7.8 percent is very close to 7.407…percent, I have no other option but to conclude that Ted’s 1944 math instructor was leaving a message for us. He was the “1st skeptic” and more than deserving of a Nobel prize. In fact, he’s telling us that the Anthropogenic to Air/Ocean ratio is a universal constant = 2/27. Not more, not less, and that is the number that needs to go in the models.
5. Since I am the 1st to reveal this truth, I claim name ownership. Henceforth it will be known as “Garacka’s Rule”.
Consider the difference between a petroleum geologist and a climate researcher.
The geologist remotely studies the subsurface sometimes for years, then decides to ask his company to drill a multi-million dollar well. If he is wrong, he may well lose his job and reputation.
On the other hand, it is well understood that some research “scientists” need only come up with an alarming story, and they will get front page coverage on many of the world’s newspapers and in the halls of Congress and Parliament. Journalists and politicians want an alarming story. The truth behind it is secondary or often even unacceptable.
Has Lewis Pugh made it to the North Pole yet?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7588329.stm
“I actually have corals propagating to the point that I have to remove them and trade with the local fish store.”
You are a god. I’ve studied everything but can’t keep fish more than a couple months.
Aquarist sites are a great place to learn about the CO2 buffering system in the oceans. Perhaps, a reef aquarium log should be submitted with all papers for publication?
Thanks for the link Lucy Skywalker, fascinating real science.
This is second post related to the initial graph ( as the topic matter is so different to the 1st post). This a geologic perspective on the subject, which I think provides definitive evidence that CO2 “acidification” isn’t a problem.
As a geologist, I find the top plot to be fascinating – especially the CO2 curve. A first order least squares fit to the CO2 curve basically shows that CO2 has generally been decreasing with time. There is a plot I wish I could show you, but I couldn’t find online for the post – the distribution of carbonate rocks with geologic time. As posted by Mike D. (02:33:26) :, carbonate rocks are by far the biggest CO2 sink in the carbon cycle over time, so this is very relevant. As a percentage of all sedimentary rocks, if plotted versus time, the carbonate % of total sediments would look very similar to the CO2 plot – much more carbonate rocks in the distant geological past, much less in recent geologic times. This is important because the vast majority of carbonate rocks are formed through biologic processes – plants & animals precipitating aragonite from sea water. Based on this observation, It would appear that the more CO2 available, the more that the organisms can extract from ocean – thus the bio-systems thrive better with more CO2 in the ocean – that’s what the geologic record says. This is consistent with what Fraizer (22:11:28) : posted relative to his aquarium experiment. It also says that even with the very high CO2 levels of the past -as much as 20x current levels, that the oceans were not sufficiently “acidified” that precipitation of aragonite was a problem.
Extrapolating further, 2 interesting thoughts :
1) Based on the geologic record, lack of CO2 may be the problem, not too much CO2.
2) The other implication is that the ocean carbonate factory is slowly depleting our atmosphere of CO2 over geologic time – putting all the CO2 into storage in carbonate rocks. Think about this long term if it continues- CO2 is plant food. Will we reach some point in the future where plant life is decreased / impossible due to lack of CO2? No plants = no animals = no food = no life. Of course, none of this would be in our lifetime, but it is something to ponder. How ironic ….
Unpolluted rainwater falling in the ocean has a pH of about 5.2, which is about one thousand times as acidic as seawater. Acid rain has been measured at about one million times as acidic as seawater. Every raindrop that hits the ocean makes it less alkaline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain
Perhaps Parliament should legislate an end to rainfall in the oceans, to reduce “ocean acidification?”
I like how you think you know better than 150 marine researchers sounding an alarm. Lets “wait and see” until the ocean is a deadzone. Brilliant.
“The declaration, supported by Prince Albert II of Monaco, builds on findings from an earlier international summit.
It says pH levels are changing 100 times faster than natural variability.”
100 times faster? nothing out of line there!