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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Bill D.: Thanks for that comment; well said! Seems that the American Disenlightenment is in full gallop here.
Bill D
Unfortunately, the rate of acidification of the world’s oceans is about 100X faster than in the past… This means that the coral species that now present will have difficulty surviving. … However, it is naive to think that the animals that currently occupy the world’s oceans are the same ones that occurred millions of years ago when the world’s atmospheric CO2 was higher… Animals (including corals) may have difficulty adapting to the rapid acidification …
—-
Fraizer (22:11:28) :
I can tell you for a fact that my corals have never done so well since I began the regular addition of CO2.
———-
When I see a post like this from Bill D AFTER the post from Fraizer – I have to conclude that one’s intuition carries more weight than facts. Maybe I’m naive, but facts carry more weight with me. Do I have that wrong, Bill?
Per Strandberg (04:21:10) : “Most scientists in these disciplines are disciples of what I call Apocalyptic Environmentalism of which the Global Warming Movement is just a part, although an important one.
This religion has its roots in the belief in a very fragile and delicate ecological balance. If this balance is changed, especially if this is caused by human activity, then the system will crash.”
Re the fragile and delicate ecological balance, this is what Adrian Wills had to say last week. He is the head of Eden, a new digital TV channel in the UK, which is part owned by BBC Worldwide. “The Earth is a fragile place and we were keen to launch with a message that would draw attention to the uncertain state of our finely balanced environment. Our aim is to reflect one amazing world, with one amazing channel that can address issues like climate change whilst providing an entertaining, informative experience by airing a range of high-end premieres, landmark natural history programmes and first class wildlife documentaries.”
The “message” he is referring to was, of course, the floating of a giant plastic sculpture of a mother polar bear and her cub (stranded on a plastic ice floe) down the Thames last Monday. This will be repeated in cities around the UK, such as Birmingham and Glasgow.
Could the media’s bias, in these matters, be any more evident?
I said, “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])”
Sorry, I just realized that’s confusing.
**the higher values for 10 meters were at a different location from the surface measurements.
**those values at 10 meters were higher in that case than the BBC’s, not lower as MOST of the other data on that site were.
A couple of questions if anybody can answer them
How much carbonic acid would it take to change the oceans pH by 0.1?
What does that volume translate to in gigatonnes of C02?
Is the relationship between carbonic acid and ocean pH a direct one or are there factors involved that either increase or decrease its impact?
Yes, and this is the real problem with being able to blame all environmental problems on CO2s contribution to global warming. It is that governments have a convenient reason to look away from finding the real source of the problem and the people buying the politicians, i.e., big business, are happy to have AGW as the main focus of our environmental efforts.
You’d expect the pH to drop as the depth of the measurement increases. But then only to a point. That’s because as the depth increases the water is colder, cold water can absorb more Co2 which in turn reacts with more of the bicarbonate, which is alkaline, dropping the pH marginally.
Cold water is more dense than warm and so it sinks. I know with fresh water that the maximum density is found at 4 C which is why ice forms top down and not bottom up. Not sure about salt water.
If water didn’t have that endearing quality this would be a very different planet.
woodfortrees:
OK, let’s look at an empirical, real world experiment, rather than listening to opinions:
I worked for over 30 years in a large metrology/calibration lab. Prominently displayed on a wall was a sign that said:
There are a lot of “expert” opinions here implying that coral bleaching is due to AGW. I prefer to listen to a real expert who tested that hypothesis in his reef aquariums.
1998 Coral Reef Bleaching in Indian Ocean Unprecedented, NOAA Announces
An episode of extremely high ocean temperatures migrated from south to north throughout the Indian Ocean during the first six months of 1998 causing considerable coral reef bleaching in its wake, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports.
A somewhat similar episode occurred following the 1987 El Nino in the Indian Ocean; however, in 1988 the extreme sea surface temperature anomalies, toxic to corals, moderated sufficiently as the sun moved into the Northern Hemisphere. In that year, reefs in the Indian Ocean north of the equator were spared heavy bleaching.
In 1998, this has not been the case. Bleaching, earlier projected by NOAA, has been reported from the field on the following reefs: Seychelles; Kenya; Reunion; Mauritius; Somalia; Madagascar; Maldives; Indonesia; Sri Lanka; Gulf of Thailand [Siam]; Andaman Islands; Malaysia; Oman; India; and Cambodia.
This unprecedented round of bleaching in coral reefs throughout the Indian Ocean follows El Nino-related bleaching events during late-1997 and early-1998 both projected by NOAA’s satellite HotSpot charts and documented by reef scientists in Mexico (Pacific), Panama (Pacific); Galapagos; Australia’s Great Barrier Reef; Papua New Guinea; and American Samoa.
http://www.fishingnj.org/artcoral3.htm
Massive coral bleaching in Madagascar
Blue Ventures
October 6, 2006
“Global warming is a major threat to the world’s coral reefs, but there are other more direct threats as well that can be more immediately addressed,” said Harris. “Destructive fishing practices and nutrient runoff from villages and resorts are also killing these incredible underwater systems that provide vital resources for the people of Madagascar.”
http://news.mongabay.com/2006/1006-madagascar.html
No mention of acidification of ocean by either Harris or NOAA, is this another lot of BS.
“Natural variability” includes things like asteroid impacts, volcanoes, tsunamis, floods, droughts, ice ages, etc. Those who cling to the idea that nature is naturally “stable” are deluding themselves.
A key point of this piece is to point out the gap between the theorists and the observational record. One of my favourite Michael Crichton lines was from Jurassic Park – “life will find a way.” Clearly the corals have recovered exceptionally well at Bikini despite all the “thousands of papers” which predict they should have done otherwise. I have been near a few nuclear blasts, and I can assure you that they produce more rapid changes to the environment than CO2 increasing by 0.00009 concentration.
Good thing no scientists have yet been allowed to dump chemicals in the ocean to stop global warming. Who knows how much damage that will do?
Maybe people can write a few thousand more papers to convince the Bikini corals that they are supposed to be dead?
From Sod to so many other true believers, why can you not get it through your heads?
There is literally no rapid acidification happening.
Like so much else involved with the bizarre-o world of AGW, acidification is as real as alien abductions.
One sure sign of how bad AGW is, is this:
AGW ‘climatologists; keep rewriting non-climate science to ‘prove’ that CO2 and a ‘rapid’ change in _X_ is caused by CO2.
Corals have been under pressure by many human caused and natural factors for many many years. But *now* it is, like the forest scam or the phony Antarctic heating scam, all about AGW.
Chen-Tung A. chen, is a very prolific investigator. I don’t know enough to critique his work yet, but he’s got lots of data, and his methods do seem ok on superficial reading. Also, he seems to also have milking the AGW funding cow down to an art.
In this paper he has info on pH which also shows it’s variability. (see esp., figs 3 and 10)
http://www.mgac.nsysu.edu.tw/ctchen/Publications/A/86.pdf
I’ve never heard of the expression ‘American Disenlightenment’ before, but it’s the best possible description for remarks such as this one:
“There are a lot of “expert” opinions here implying that coral bleaching is due to AGW. I prefer to listen to a real expert who tested that hypothesis in his reef aquariums.”
The idea that someone rather believes some guy with an aquarium (God knows what he did and if he tells the truth) than thousands of peer-reviewed papers by scientists who spend a life time studying the oceans, makes my stomach churn. Smokey, you kill all the hope I have for humanity.
Robert Rust says:
Unfortunately, we don’t know the state of Fraizer’s aquariums before he started adding CO2. It is an interesting data point, but to make it science would involve …
Of course, those guys who got the Nobel in Medicine for the discovery of H Pylori and their association with peptic ulcers got their start by listening to interesting real-world observations, or so I am lead to believe.
When I see statements like this, “pH levels are changing 100 times faster than natural variability”, my BS alarms start ringing deafeningly.
What is their metric to decide what is “natural variability”?
It just brings back memories of “unprecedented” temperature rise.
DaveE.
Richard Sharpe (10:00:02) :
Marcus’ comment about Henry’s law is the simplest way to look at CO2 equilibrium between the atmosphere and water. You can be sure that oceanographers are also considering effects of wind mixing and other factors. As Marcus points out, the effect of the increase in atmospheric CO2 in increasing CO2 in the ocean is much greater than the effect of water warming in reducing CO2 solubility
Scientist doing experiments and obsevations on the effects of pH and temperature on corals donot need to consider why the oceans are warmer, only that in the last 20+ years the increases in peak temperatures are too high for corals. However, if you want make predictions about the future, you need to know whether water temperature will continue to rise and if humans will continue to use large amounts of fossil fuels.
The oceans have been a major sink for carbon over the ages. For example, many studies have looked at how fecal pellets of copepods carry undigested carbon to deep sediments. There are hundreds of studies by oceanographers on how carbon and many other elements are transported from the upper mixed layers of the ocean to deep waters. In general, however, a lot of the carbon dioxide adsorped into the ocean is recycled in the upper layers even after it is taken up in photosynthesis. Deposing of carbon usually requires the transport of particulate matter to deep waters. Most algae sink too slowly to fall into deeper waters before decomposing. Diatoms have higher sinking rates and are therefore an exception. Some planktonic protists also have limestone skeletons and enter the sediments when they die.
Although this is not my field, I am aware of sessions of oceangraphy meetings that considered silica depletion (Si is required by diatoms) to be an important factor in determining the oceans effect as a carbon sink over past millenia and in the present as well. Over the last 20 + years thousands of studies have been published that are increasing our understanding of carbon cycling in the oceans and its potential effect on climate, past, present and future. Modeling studies are only a part of this effort.
The story of H. pilori is a classic in science. Scientists did not believe that this bacterium was an important cause of stomach ulcers until its discoverer published convincing results. When scientist think that they may have a new discovery, they work very hard to collect data and conduct experiments that will be convincing to other scientists. When you make a significant discovery and/or find a new test of an hypothesis, this is a good chance to write a convincing and successful grant proposal.
HERE’S AN INTERESTING CLAIM…
“The shelf water is now supersaturated with respect to calcite and aragonite, but could become undersaturated with a doubling of the current atmospheric CO2 level. The carbonate deposits on the shelf could then begin to neutralize excess CO2 and become an important excess CO2 sink.”
http://www.mgac.nsysu.edu.tw/ctchen/Publications/A/87.pdf
In other words, increased CO2 will result in better CO2 removal from atmosphere, i.e., it sounds like he’s saying it’s probably self regulating.
I read an article in Chemical and Engineering News, a long time ago, describing the possibility of deep-sea disposal of CO2 — the CO2 under extreme pressure, forms a hydrate, which does not dissolve in the ocean water. I cannot find the article, but this article seems to capture the gist of it:
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/1999/may12/co2disposal-512.html
(Hope that URL doesn’t wrap).
Didn’t see any mention of worries about changing th ph of sea water.
From Per Strandberg:
“After been studying the Global Warming movement and the bad science it is based on I have come to realize that the problem is not only limited to Global Warming but it goes much deeper and it now affects most disciplines of natural science.
Most scientists in these disciplines are disciples of what I call Apocalyptic Environmentalism of which the Global Warming Movement is just a part, although an important one.
This religion has its roots in the belief in a very fragile and delicate ecological balance.”
I submit that this religion is also rooted in the high cost of conducting most modern research in the natural sciences and the fact that getting tenure is tied to publishing research papers. In order to get research money, you have to “tow the party line”. This process filters out many reseachers with different belief systems. This is one of the reasons I got out of science as a career.
Smokey:
Having two reef aquariums in my home, I must agree with Fraizer.
A buffer is the combination of an acid with a base, and that is called a salt. When a salt is in solution, the introduction of a very weak acid it neutalized by the buffer.
Last year, someone was debating with me on this same subject, so I had us both perform the exact same experiment.
We each setup two 1 liter test bottles and place 1 cm of Argonite in the bottom of these test containers.
Aquarium salt was then mixed to a specific gravity of 1.023 and placed into our test and control bottles.
To generate CO2, another bottle was created with aquarium tubing attached to its top. Each day, 1 tbs of baking soda and 1 cup of white vinegar was placed into the CO2 generation bottles and the gases were bubbled into the saltwater test bottle.
Each day, prior to the introduction of the CO2, Aquarium pH test strips were used to test the water in each of the test bottles.
For three months, my buddy and I conducted this experiment. He was absolutly convinced the the CO2 would acidify the saltwater.
I knew better!
Was this a perfectly controlled experiment?
No, but it got the point across to my buddy about the effect of a buffer (salt) in the solution.
Someone probably already asked, but what are the oceans historical rate of pH change, and how is that determined?
I think this article implies that Coral is too stupid to evolve. Its kind of like people worrying about people from Bangledesh drowning when the mythical rise in Oceans occur. That too implies that the people from bangledesh who now cope with tides that rise and fall 15 feet are too stupid to deal with a few inches of ocean rise in 100 years.
In reality, the article proves that the BBC are too stupid to evolve and are incapable of dealing with facts and new information.
woodfortrees,
When the weedy invasive underbrush of AGW pseudoscience is cleared out, we can get to the real science of climate. Until then, it is fight and resist and expose the fraud of AGW.
There are a lot of “expert” opinions here implying that coral bleaching is due to AGW. I prefer to listen to a real expert who tested that hypothesis in his reef aquariums.
Category Error. The acidification (or de-alkalinisation) is a concern because it will make it harder for calcifying organisms to make hard structures. This requires seawater to be supersaturated with calcium and carbonate ions to ensure that once formed the CaCO3 does not dissolve. Lower pH reduces the carbonate saturation of the seawater, making calcification harder and also weakening any structures that have been formed. Feely et al found that a doubling of CO2 will reduce calcification by between 5-25% depending on species.
Coral Bleaching, on the other hand, in this context, is either a consequence of heat stress, or is made worse by heat stress.
Hypothesis testing is at the core of good science, of course, but you have to test the right hypothesis! It would be interesting to know of the pH if the aquarium was measured; however to test the global warming / bleaching hypothesis an experiment would have to be devised that increased the water temperature gradually to simulate the rise in SSTs over recent decades with occaional spikes of 2-3C to simulate El Nino events. Not an experiment I would recommend to someone who cares about the welfare of their aquarium …
Bob Coats (09:31:35) :
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.
Warming and Acidifying Seas
The concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere now exceeds 380 ppm, which is more than 80 ppm above the maximum values of the past 740,000 years (5, 6), if not 20 million years (7). During the 20th century, increasing [CO2]atm has driven an increase in the global oceans’ average temperature by 0.74°C and sea level by 17 cm, and has depleted seawater carbonate concentrations by 30 µmol kg–1 seawater and acidity by 0.1 pH unit (8). Approximately 25% (2.2 Pg C year–1) of the CO2 emitted from all anthropogenic sources (9.1 Pg C year–1) currently enters the ocean (9), where it reacts with water to produce carbonic acid. Carbonic acid dissociates to form bicarbonate ions and protons, which in turn react with carbonate ions to produce more bicarbonate ions, reducing the availability of carbonate to biological systems (Fig. 1A). Decreasing carbonate-ion concentrations reduce the rate of calcification of marine organisms such as reef-building corals, ultimately favoring erosion at 200 µmol kg–1 seawater (7, 10)
Now that selection, from your article, is bloviating. Does anyone here believe the bolded assertion. Do you see the circuitous logic? More carbon leads to more bicarbonate leads to more…. What????? Do you see a chemist in the list of authors (below).
1 Centre for Marine Studies, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, 4072 Queensland, Australia.
2 Marine Spatial Ecology Laboratory, School of BioSciences, University of Exeter, Prince of Wales Road, Exeter EX4 4PS, UK.
3 AJH Environmental Services, 4900 Auburn Avenue, Suite 201, Bethesda, MD 20814, USA.
4 University of Maine, School of Marine Sciences, Darling Marine Center, Walpole, ME 04573, USA.
5 The Chancellery, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, 4072 Queensland, Australia.
6 Marine Science Institute, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines.
7 Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, E321 Corson Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
8 International Network on Water, Environment and Health, United Nations University, 50 Main Street East, Hamilton, Ontario L8N 1E9, Canada.
9 School of Biology, Ridley Building, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE17RU, UK.
10 Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
11 National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20013, USA.
12 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Coral Reef Watch, E/RA31, 1335 East West Highway, Silver Spring, MD 20910–3226, USA.
13 Unidad Académica Puerto Morelos, Instituto de Ciencias del Mar y Limnología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Apdo. Postal 1152, Cancún 77500 QR, México.
14 Wildlife Conservation Society, 2300 Southern Boulevard, Bronx, New York, NY 10460, USA.
15 Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program, Australian National University, Canberra, 0200 Australia.
16 Institute of Marine Sciences, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
17 Environment Department, MC5-523, The World Bank, 1818 H Street, NW, Washington, DC20433, USA
Jon Jewett (22:07:22) :
Neil,
Salt (NaCl) does not have an effect on maintaining the pH in this case.
TerryS (10:22:40) :
A couple of questions if anybody can answer them
How much carbonic acid would it take to change the oceans pH by 0.1?
What does that volume translate to in gigatonnes of C02?
Is the relationship between carbonic acid and ocean pH a direct one or are there factors involved that either increase or decrease its impact?
Solutions of carbon dioxide in water can be of H 2 CO 3, or the salts of carbonic acid called bicarbonates (or hydrogen carbonates) and carbonates.
The ocean is filled with buffering cations, Mg, Na, Ca, K to name some common ones. The concentration or prevalence of any molecule containing CO3(and derivatives) in the ocean is subject to specific disassociation constants, temperature, and concentration of other molecules, etc., even if they don’t contain carbon (for example magnesium or calcium sulfate). Which means every molecule that can form a salt with carbon is present in the ocean, some in large concentrations, some miniscule. (I just knew that old Quantitative Analysis would come in handy—NOT).
Summation:
Technically speaking, NaCl is involved.
Terry, the ocean chemical makeup is very, very ,very complex. The questions you ask are still being debated, with wildly divergent numbers. Research in this area is even less “consensusified” than dCO2/dt.
Now I’m going to have a brewsky and watch the game. Burn me at the stake at your leisure.