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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Chemistry was always my weak link. I have tried reading reams of science review – including the Royal Society report, and just now, Floor Anthoni, and I am still confused!
Warming ocean waters release carbon dioxide and become more acid? Cooling oceans absorb carbon dioxide and…..?
Hence – solar induced 20th century global warming warms the oceans, with great spatial and depth variation, and there is outgassing and rising carbon dioxide levels BUT the current rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is apparently clearly due to fossil fuels (c-14 already decayed) and not ocean outgassing (c-14 not decayed? but the deep water has been enriched from the sediments which may have long lost their c-14???)
I am more than somewhat confused. And I do recommend Floor Anthoni for his refreshing approach – even if it will take me a month to study and understand!
Oceans have all sorts of buffering chemicals that prevent PH changes, have small relative surface areas to the atmosphere, are large bodies fed with comparatively small quantities of rain water, etc. One would expect that fresh water systems would be more quickly and severely effected by increases in PH caused by CO2. 1) They are fed by rain water in such quantities that it actually cycles the entire body of water. Thus having an enormous effective surface area to the atmosphere via the surface area of the droplets of rain. 2) Have no buffering chemicals like sodium bicarbonate.
Aquarium hobbyists often inject CO2 into their coral reefs and fresh water systems. Aquariums are already stressful environments due to the crowding of fish, high nitrogen levels, fluctuating PH due to buildup of organic acids, etc. One would think corals were so sensitive to changes in C02 causes PH fluctuation that hobbyists wouldn’t inject CO2. This goes double for fresh water setups.
Out of curiosity, I consulted my reliable Websters Unabridged Dictionary, which was published in 1989, before the ball got rolling on the “acidification” of the oceans issue. It defines “acidify”, the verb form, and “acidification” the noun form as: “to make or become acid; convert into an acid.”
It’s pretty clear to me that the term became applied to a slight reduction in alkalinity to elicit a fear reaction. Why don’t we say the ocean is becoming less caustic? 😉
It’s sad how WIkipedia has been corrupted, and can only be trusted on non-controversial matters.
Though, as i said before, this is not about science but just marketing, it is useful to underline that for CO2 to increase its amount in sea water it needs a cooler sea water, then they have to choose between global warming, as they say, as a consequence of CO2 increase in the atmosphere, with warmer seas and less CO2 in the sea water, or colder seas with more dissolved CO2 in it.
RobJM, so you know Biology 101? Heard of Liebig’s Law of the Minimum?
Algae will take oxygen, the part that is missing in the oceanic dead zones, but they need other nutrients too, so doubt your envisioned scheme has a long lasting life, anywhere in the living world.
One last calculation based on the initial numbers presented. I’ll go with the assumption that there is a reasonable proxy for ph back in 1751 & there is a way to estimate it to 4 decimals….
If you assume the ocean PH is in equilibrium with atmospheric CO2 concentrations – which is the hypothesis put forward in the paper, then you can calculate at what concentration of CO2 the oceans ph reaches 7.0 – or neutral – before it goes acidic. It is a simple ratio calculation :
Ocean PH vs Atmospheric CO2
Year CO2 PH
1800 280 8.179
1994 357 8.104
differnces 77 -0.075
target PH 7.0
differnce from current ph -1.104
Ratio 14.72
Ratio * CO2 diff 1133.44
total value 1490.44
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:
1) The oceans ph & atmospheric CO2 are not in equilibrium, thus atmospheric CO2 isn’t as important to ocean ph as the hypothesis suggests.
2) There are other buffering mechanisms in the ocean that keep the ph above 7.0, regardless of atmospheric CO2.
3) Even the IPCC doesnt suggest that CO2 concentrations will get to this level – they are around 700 ppm in the year 2100. Reversing the calculation, if in equilibrium (which doesnt seem to be supported based on points 1 &2, + the geological record, but we’ll go with it anyway), the ocean PH would only drop to 7.7699 by the year 2100 (might as well go with the 4 decimal places) – which of course is still a base, not an acid.
4) Back one more time to John Philip (04:51:14) : – which says bleaching events are associated with warming events – such as the 1998 El Nino. We know that CO2 solubility decreases with increasing temperature – so a warming event would decrease the disolved CO2 in the area of warming – so we are having dying / bleaching events in water with LESS CO2 (and in theory higher PH). Again, the data always says more CO2 is better – at least when it comes to coral. The data appears to be not permissive of arguing the opposite.
In the whole “CO2 is bad” arena, the ocean acidification hypothesis is actually easier to conclusively debunk than AGW with only minimal digging into the data. Again back to post 1, this argument is so flimsy that all it really does is undermine the credibility of all environmental science. Enough said.
I made a comment a few weeks ago about the fallacious use of ‘acidification’. CO2 and its magical effects are just silly. Warm water holds less CO2, so unless there is some other source for acid, the oceans must be cooling to become less alkaline. The equilibrium of dissolved CO2 in the oceans, maxiumum levels, were reached long before we crawled out of the swamps. There is a lot more going on in our world than CO2, it needs a lot less attention than it is getting so we can tackle real problems.
Paul Clark,
I’m not following your logic at all. Bikini was hit by a series of thermonuclear blasts 50 years ago, and yet the corals are thriving despite an additional 55 years of rising CO2 in the atmosphere. Corals are apparently very resilient and adaptive.
Here are some nice drawings of Ordovician sea life. Not very different from today – with aragonite shells. Aragonite has not changed.
http://www.mcgill.ca/redpath/exhibits/special/ordovician_diorama/
After diving into the crater, Zoe Richards of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University says, I didnt know what to expect some kind of moonscape perhaps. But it was incredible, huge matrices of branching Porites coral (up to 8 meters high) had established, creating thriving coral reef habitat. Throughout other parts of the lagoon it was awesome to see coral cover as high as 80 per cent and large tree-like branching coral formations with trunks 30cm thick. It was fascinating Ive never seen corals growing like trees outside of the Marshall Islands. The healthy condition of the coral at Bikini atoll today is proof of their resilience and ability to bounce back from massive disturbances, that is, if the reef is left undisturbed and there are healthy nearby reefs to source the recovery.
Jennifer Marohasy points to Craig Idso’s article on coral responses to CO2.
It is worthwhile reading what some real-world investigative research has shown as opposed to a bunch of armchair theorizing.
Regarding “dead zones” mentioned above. Yes these are scary. They are known to be caused mainly by fertilizer runoff and over-fishing. Some scientists have tried to link it to global warming by some dubious theories. Nobody has yet blamed acidity as far as I know but that’ll be coming. Now you can believe in the CO2 catastrophism which now apparently says (ref Susan Solomon) yes we should cut our CO2 but it’s too late anyway (ok more guesswork and more propaganda) or you can presume that it’s more likely to be nothing to do with CO2 or global warming and that likely it’s just runoff and over-fishing – as we always suspected until the CO2 alarmists came along – and actually do something to prevent it.
Jeff L says:
Yes. This is one very solid demonstration that alarmist are unwilling to think through the consequences of their claims and that they are solely interested in scaring people for political reasons.
Let me set this out in words of one syllable for you AGWers.
Higher CO2 is supposed to lead to higher temperatures, including ocean temperatures! However, higher water temperatures lead to lower levels of dissolved CO2 and thus higher Ph in the oceans, that is, lower acidification and corals should thrive, by your assumption.
This would seem to be a major fail on the part of the hysterical.
Steven,
“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.”
But the onus is there. The style and content of your pieces induces me to believe you haven’t been looking for it. Like Bill D said:
“However, our understanding of the effects of pH change is solidly ground in 1000’s of scientific papers. This literature shows that ocean life is already being effected and will become much more serious in the coming decades, given current levels of human CO2 release. There is no need to readers here to speculate that the recent and ongoing changes in ocean pH are not important. As mentioned in the first line of this post, this is a topic of very intensive, experimental research.”
Now the reason I feel induced that you haven’t done a broad research by using Google Scholar for example, is the fact that you talk about levels (ie CO2 levels being higher 500 million years ago and the oceans teeming with life) and not at all about the rate at which these levels are changing. That’s what the whole acidification-story is about, isn’t it?
Here’s a quote from the BBC article with the inaccurate ‘Acid Oceans’-title:
“It says pH levels are changing 100 times faster than natural variability. ”
Now pray tell me, if this is true, how can creatures adapt to changes that are 100 times faster than natural variability? That would be a problem, wouldn’t it? How would marine life have reacted 500 million years ago if pH levels would have changed 100 times faster than natural variability?
Jeff L –
pH is a logarithmic scale, so the math is a little more involved than finding a ratio. At the same time, I agree this is much ado about nothing, and the original article is terrible reporting.
off topic,
BBC abandons ‘impartiality’ on warming,
Londoners might have been startled last Monday to see a giant mock-up of a polar bear on an iceberg, floating on the Thames outside the Palace of Westminster. They might not have been so surprised to learn, first, that this was a global warming propaganda stunt and, second, that the television company behind it is part-owned by the BBC.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/4413474/BBC-abandons-impartiality-on-warming.html
Most of these comments are just ignorant bloviating, reflecting a complete lack of understanding of basic geochemistry and oceanography. Go to the literature and do some reading, before you shoot your mouth off! Two good places to start are:
1. Hoegh-Guldberg, et al. 2007. Coral reefs under rapid climate change and ocean acidification. Science 318:1737-1472.
2. De’ath et al. 2009. Declining coral calcification in the Great Barrier Reef. Science 323:116-119.
These papers will lead you other good ones. If you can’t find them for free on line, then get thee to a library (remember what a library is?)
This is frustrating for what is supposed to be a science blog. Many bloggers are drawing conclusions based on misunderstanding of basic principles of physics, chemistry and biology. Many of you seem to assume that the majority of scientists are either fraudulent or incompetent. However, this is not based on reading the science literature or even an understanding of what can be found in basic undergraduate text books. Perhaps scientist appear to be wrong because it seems implausible that humans can have widespread or global effects on the environment.
Scientific research is a very competitive field and the best way to get one’s manuscript rejected for publication is to drawn conclusions that are not well supported by the data and results of one’s study. It seems arrogant to me to assume that the majority of people doing basic research in environmental sciences are fraudulent or incompetent. Do you assume that medical science, for example is equally unreliable?
Scientists spend their lives looking for holes and weaknesses in the current literature. It makes no sense at all that people who devote their life study to understanding how nature works would overlook very simple (but often erroneous) factors that people with little training in science simply guess might be important or may have been overlooked. If you think that scientists have over looked or misintrepted the importance of some variable, you are going to need to spend a few months reading the scientific literature to find out if that is the case.
As an aside, “acidification” is the routine scientific term for a decrease in
pH. “Neutralization” is more ambigous, since it could mean either a decline from an alkaline pH or an increase from an acidic pH. We could invent a new term, such as “de-alkinization” but we don’t have such a term. Scientists use the term “acidification” because there is no other single word that accurately discribes this process and no one has come up with a better term. Use of the term “acidification” cannot be taken as an effort to exaggerate or dramatize.
Steven Goddard asked “Has Lewis Pugh made it to the North Pole yet?”
According to Wikipedia … “The expedition coincided with some scientists predicting that the North Pole could be free of sea-ice for the first time this summer[1]; however, Pugh was forced to abandon his planned 745-mile trip about 500 miles from the North Pole due to ice.”
Back on topic, can anyone direct me to a data base of actual ph measurements over time? Thanks in advance for assistance.
Gah! Acidification means “becoming more acidic” regardless of whether you are above or below pH 7! One could say “the process of the oceans becoming less alkaline” which would also be true, but kind of awkward which is why real scientists don’t use that terminology.
Two examples: One: if I say “today is 2 degrees warmer than yesterday” is this less true if yesterday was -30 degrees C or 80 degrees C? No! I could also say “today is 2 degrees less cold” but again, awkward.
Other example: for the fun of it, I did a search for “alkalinization”: I get hits like the following: “Alkalinization of the urine with potassium citrate to a pH of 6.5 to 7 is recommended”
Huh. But… that’s a pH below 7! This website is using the term “alkalinization” rather than “making urine less acidic” because of fear mongering! They want people to worry that their urine is going to turn into evil dissolving lye!
Look: if you want to argue that corals will survive a more acidic ocean, fine. Your best argument would probably rest on the study by Alina Szmant – look it up. I’d still think you’re wrong, and that acidification is adding stress on top of warming and pollution and overfishing, but I’d be willing to be convinced by further experiments along the lines of Szmant et al. that show that her conclusion is robust across a number of different coral organisms and conditions. (having worked with buffered solutions trying to keep various kinds of cells alive, I was often surprised by the impacts of what seemed like small changes in pH – that log scale can be deceiving sometimes)
Jeff:
One problem with your analysis is the assumption that a pH of 7 has signficance for aquatic life. Currently living coral species will be long gone before a pH of 7.0 is reached.
Howevery, you need to read research by chemical oceanographers to be sure that your conclusions about debunking ocean acidification are valid. Compare your reasoning with a few dozen articles written by experts in ocean chemistry before you assume that they are wrong. I am not an expert in this field, but I have better trust in people who have published peer reviewed papers on the topic.
Also, for those of you arguing about CO2 become less soluble in warmer waters:
Basically, Henry’s Law states that the equilibrium concentration of CO2 in the oceans will be proportion to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere divided by Henry’s coefficient. The coefficient increases with temperature.
So, if atmospheric CO2 is constant, increasing temperature would mean decreasing CO2 in the oceans.
But atmospheric CO2 has increased by 30%. Henry’s coefficient hasn’t increased nearly that much. So the increasing temperature of the ocean just means that the ocean is a smaller sink that it might have been otherwise, not that it is a source. (those of you who argue about the carbon cycle should also try to understand this reasoning)
Bill D asks an interesting question:
H pylori?
Anyhow, please connect the dots for us. So, increasing acidification has been proven to be bad for corals by sound scientific work … all well and good.
Increasing human-produced atmospheric CO2 is supposed to lead to increased atmospheric temperatures, which lead to increased sea-surface temperatures and temperatures of the seas where corals live, which is supposed to do what to the levels of CO2 in the ocean and thus the level of pH of the ocean?
Help me understand what is going on here. I like to understand all the causal chains. Perhaps I have one of the links wrong.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14085-acidic-champagne-sea-nothing-to-celebrate-for-corals-.html
“An exploration of natural “bubble streams” of carbon dioxide in shallow Mediterranean waters off the coast of Italy is the first to document the effects of ocean acidification in a real ocean setting.”
Has any scientific study of coral impacts been done near underwater volcanoes. It would seem the environment around them would contain higher quantities of CO2 and hence give an idea as to the real world effects.
Guys as an old fashioned chemist I must point out that the pH scale is logarithmic. To get the pH to move by 1 point you have to change the acidity or alkalinity by a factor of 10, by two points by a factor of 100 etc etc.
The oceans are naturally buffered by the Carbonate/Bicarbonate reaction. As more CO2 in introduced it forms Carbonic Acid. (H20 + Co2 = H2 CO3) the Carbonic Acid reacts with the Bicarbonate already present to form Calcium Carbonate. The ocean system is vast and the amount of Bicarbonate available to react is also vast, the Ocean pH has therefore a naturally self correcting mechanism making the premise of the BBC article essentially a non issue.
And yes Cold water has a higher ability to absorb CO2 than Warm water. So if the oceans are absorbing more they must be cooling eh ?
I don’t know why my post on this doesn’t appear above, but here’s the link again, with some additional info…
CO2 measurements in the ocean…
http://www.mgac.nsysu.edu.tw/ctchen/Publications/A/64.pdf
(note – (1) the pH values decrease with ocean depth (2) the pH values are much lower than those given by the BBC, even though they were made earlier than the BBC “report.” [surface pH of 7.916 to 7.945, and at 10 meters pH measured at from 8.183 to 8.184])
Here some of the same authors take measurements at different locations with the same result that pH decreases with ocean depth…
http://www.mgac.nsysu.edu.tw/ctchen/Publications/A/95.pdf
(Note that here the data show surface pH varying from about 8.25 to a little about 8.35, seemingly dependent on location, and that in this case the pH they observe is HIGHER than the BBC’s [8.104 to 8.179])
Conclusion – pH is a lot more variable than the warmers want you to believe, and that being afraid of a drop in some global average (a meaningless concept) by a tiny fraction of that value, and well within a much larger range, is not only not scientific, it’s just plain dumb; the BBC’s information is Bubkas.