From the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the University of Southampton, we have what looks to be a another Willis igniter.
Limiting ocean acidification under global change
Emissions of carbon dioxide are causing ocean acidification as well as global warming. Scientists have previously used computer simulations to quantify how curbing of carbon dioxide emissions would mitigate climate impacts. New computer simulations have now examined the likely effects of mitigation scenarios on ocean acidification trends. They show that both the peak year of emissions and post-peak reduction rates influence how much ocean acidity increases by 2100. Changes in ocean pH over subsequent centuries will depend on how much the rate of carbon dioxide emissions can be reduced in the longer term.
Largely as a result of human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels for energy and land-use changes such deforestation, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now higher that it has been at any time over the last 800,000 years. Most scientists believe this increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide to be an important cause of global warming.
“The oceans absorb around a third of carbon dioxide emissions, which helps limit global warming, but uptake of carbon dioxide by the oceans also increases their acidity, with potentially harmful effects on calcifying organisms such as corals and the ecosystems that they support,” explained Dr Toby Tyrrell of the University of Southampton’s School of Ocean and Earth Science (SOES) based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.
“Increased ocean acidification is also likely to affect the biogeochemistry of the oceans in ways that we do not as yet fully understand,” he added.
It is widely recognised that carbon emissions need to be brought under control if the worst effects of global warming are to be avoided, but how quickly and to what extent would such mitigation measures ameliorate ocean acidification?
To address these questions, Tyrrell and his colleagues, in collaboration with researchers at the Met Office, used computer models to quantify the likely response of ocean acidification to a range of carbon dioxide emission scenarios, including aggressive mitigation. Collectively, these models take into account ocean-atmosphere interactions (such as air-sea gas exchange), climate, ocean chemistry, and the complex feedbacks between them.
“Our computer simulations allow us to predict what impact the timing and rapidity of emission reductions will have on future acidification, helping to inform policy makers” said Tyrrell.
Global mean ocean surface pH has already decreased from around 8.2 in 1750 to 8.1 today (remember than a decrease in pH corresponds to an increase in acidity). The simulations suggest that global mean ocean pH could fall to between 7.7 and 7.8 by 2100 if carbon dioxide emissions are not controlled.
“As far as we know, such a rate of change would be without precedent for millions of years, and a concern must be whether and how quickly organisms could adapt to such a rate of change after such a long period of relative stability in ocean pH,” said Tyrrell.
However, if an aggressive emissions control scenario can be adopted, with emissions peaking in 2016 and reducing by 5% per year thereafter, the simulations suggest that mean surface ocean pH is unlikely to fall below 8.0 by 2100. But even that represents a large change in pH since the pre-industrial era.
A clear message from the study is that substantial emission reductions need to occur as soon as possible and that further reductions after atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration peaks will be needed if ocean pH is to be stabilized.
“Over the longer term, out to say 2500, the minimum pH will depend on just how far the annual rate of carbon dioxide emissions can be reduced to,” said Tyrrell.
The researchers are Influence of mitigation policy on ocean acidification Dan Bernie (Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter), Jason Lowe (Met Office Hadley Centre, University of Reading), and Toby Tyrrell and Oliver Legge (SOES).
The research was supported by the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), and the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme-funded projects EPOCA (European Project on Ocean Acidification) and MEECE (Marine Ecosystem Evolution in a Changing Environment).
Bernie, D., Lowe, J., Tyrrell, T. & Legge, O. Influence of mitigation policy on ocean acidification, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L15704 (2010). doi:10.1029/2010GL043181.
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Now we need some credible souls in the appropriate scientific fields to independently validate these findings over the course of the next 50 years. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but.. who knows? I know I’m being nieve about all this but human history reveals that humans are more lemming-like than lemmings and it’s one thing to claim and prove that such-‘n-such is true, and an altogether other thing to do something about it. Not an apples and oranges comparison in my opinion, but a molehill and mountain type of thing –’tis very easy to ‘prove’ something, ’tis another kettle of fish to ‘do’ anything. Wake me up when everyone starts jumping off the cliff.
The Monterey Bay ph data clearly needs to be corrected, as the NZ and Aussie temperature records (and so much else) have been. The key line is at the bottom of the report, who funded it. He who pays the piper calls the tune. There is another 1.9 billion euros worth of funding alarmist science heading down the pipes in EU framework 7 alone.
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/environment/home_en.html
It is a reasonable assumption that all this funding will go to the consensus of catastrophists. It pays to conform.
I love this fascination with computer modelling. It is admission from the global warming alarmists and the IPCC that their case is mute. Otherwise, they would be using actual data to back up their claims.
I love the myopia of alarmists. They are horrified by surface temperatures rising, but ignore or are oblivious to falling temperatures in the Lower Stratosphere, and the cooling of the Thermosphere by rising CO2!
I love the WUWT photos of air conditioners, concrete, asphalt, etc., encroaching on the GHCN temperature measurement stations; the closing of stations in upper latitudes; the 1,200-km radius “smoothing” over missing stations; the corruption of the historical temperature records.
Twenty years from now when we are deep within the Grand Solar Minimum, freezing our butts off, all this agw alarmism will be a distant memory. The only fear I have is: how much damage will these alarmists and politicians have inflicted on society? How many trillions of dollars will have been stolen from taxpayers and wasted examining and attempting to fix a non-problem? And who is benefitting from this continued charade?
The people overwrought about changes in ocean pH and climate change have created the mythology the earth’s systems have a steady state that have dangerously deviated because of humanity’s sins. Though we like to think superstition and witchcraft have vanished in our age of widespread education and scientific enlightenment, it appears a large percentage of people are all to ready to embrace the supernatural and hand over their autonomy to the high priests of the new religion of climate science. I wonder when the burnings of the heretics will begin. Oh, wait a minute, there are already calls for retribution and punishment for the skeptics.
So would good questions to ask of anybody be:
1. Is the ocean acidic at the moment?
2. Has the ocean been acidic in the last 60 million years?
I assume the answer would be “no” in both cases, and that anyone who says “yes” is wrong.
Or should I specify the Pacific Ocean only? (Pearson et al., 2000)
Are there records for other oceans for 60 million years?
David A. Evans says:
August 21, 2010 at 3:24 pm
I ask again…
What is the ph of carbonated mineral water?
DaveE.
About pH 4.
earthdog says:
August 21, 2010 at 8:38 pm
Dang. That is:
Acid Neutral Base
1 ———- 7 ———— 13
More like:
Acid -Neutral—- Base
0 ———- 7 ———— 14
At 25ºC, it varies with temperature, neutral pH is greater than 7 for temperatures below 25ºC. For most of the ocean neutral pH is above 7.
log Kw = -4470.99/T + 6.0875 – 0.01706 T so if you halve that and change the sign
you should get:
neutral pH= 2235.5/T – 3.0438 + 0.00853*T ( T in K of course)
Just imagine the headlines you would see if the research talked about increasing CO2 reducing the alkalinity of the ocean, bringing them closer to neutrality. I suspect there would be no headlines, because it sounds positively beneficial.
Gone are the visions of sea shells bubbling away as their shell are dissolved in acid seawater. Gone are the memories of acid rain dissolving Scandinavia (I lived there in the 80s and it didn’t seem to have dissolved then). Instead, the ocean is moving to a state where it is less chemically aggressive. Now who could worry about that?
Once again the spin-meisters are doing their stuff by the use of loaded phrases designed to trigger the requisite emotions in large sections of the non-scientific, green-leaning and environmentally gullible public. It is truly amazing what you can do with a few carefully chosen words.
Roger Knights says:
August 22, 2010 at 4:43 am
earthdog says:
August 21, 2010 at 8:36 pm
a move from a pH of 8.2 to 8.1 is an “increase” in acidity though it is a loss in pH. Or did I misunderstand what you were trying to say?
Setting the stage: 8.2 is 1.2 above the neutral level of 7. M
No. Therefore the term used ought to be oceanic “neutralization,” not “acidification,” given that the ocean is never going to get below the neutral level. The fact that “acidification” is being used is a giveaway that the alarmists are framing the issue.
No it’s a sign that chemists who know what they’re talking about wrote the report.
Acidification refers to an increase in the [H+], in this case we’re talking about a ~25% increase in the [H+]. It is not proper to refer to ‘alkalinity’ in reference to seawater in this context as some here have done as it has a different meaning.
Scot Ramsdell says:
“No, it depends on the buffering capacity of all the limestone in the seas.”
Not only that. The deep ocean bottoms are basaltic. Basalt is alkaline. The oceans are an alkaline liquid in an alkaline container. No way they could ever become acid, or even neutral for that matter except very locally, for example around volcanic vents (which incidentally teem with life).
SciAm August 2010
Threatening Ocean Life from the Inside Out
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=threatening-ocean-life
The article is priceless.
It puts evolutionary and marine biology under the gun to say how fast ocean life of various flavors can adapt to pH change. Good luck there. I’m predicting that with the insanely large numbers of individual fast reproducing critters involved, and recent geologic history of lower pH ocean, and extant adaptations to wide pH range that this is a non-problem. Natural selection working on large number of individiuals of many species and sub-species changing allele frequency in the populations in response to changing environment is exactly what Darwinian evolution does for a living and it’s pretty good at it. Except, I guess, when it’s politically inconvenient for it to work as advertised.
Note all the weasel words like “could” “might” “may” “possibly” and so forth.
And the obligatory demand to stop human CO2 emission of course.
Unsurprisingly it ends with (paraphrased) “please send money”.
Phil. says:
August 22, 2010 at 9:03 am
Perhaps a sign that environmental chemists wrote the report. But certainly, the more general use of the term “acidification” among chemists and non-chemists alike is just as most on this thread are using it…to become acid.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7HPND_en&defl=en&q=define:acidification&sa=X&ei=yVFxTJ-ODMKqlAf-9PG0Dg&ved=0CBkQkAE
The link shows “acidification” being used to “become less basic” is almost exclusively used in the environmental field. Most other uses refer to “becoming acid”.
You might like this one in particular.
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=acidification
And your distinction about “alkalinity” as far as being meaningful to the discussion on this thread is a distinction without a difference. In fact, some on this thread are using alkalinity in a perfectly correct sense, and those that aren’t can simply replace the word “alkalinity” with “basicity” and move right along with their lives.
Peter Plail says:
August 22, 2010 at 8:48 am
Just imagine the headlines you would see if the research talked about increasing CO2 reducing the alkalinity of the ocean, bringing them closer to neutrality. I suspect there would be no headlines, because it sounds positively beneficial.
Not to anyone who understands the chemistry.
Gone are the visions of sea shells bubbling away as their shell are dissolved in acid seawater.
Why, the solubility product of aragonite depends on [CO3–] which goes down by a factor of two+ regardless of what you call the change?
Gone are the memories of acid rain dissolving Scandinavia (I lived there in the 80s and it didn’t seem to have dissolved then).
Again why, rainwater in equilibrium with CO2 at present levels has a pH of 5, in industrial/urban areas it can be significantly lower than that, approximately as acidic as vinegar.
Instead, the ocean is moving to a state where it is less chemically aggressive. Now who could worry about that?
Moving towards ‘neutrality’ is not ‘less chemically aggressive’ for most of the lifeforms that live in the ocean. Your inaccurate choice of nomenclature would actually lead to a false sense of security among the public at large.
You should look up the Permian Extinction when ~95% of marine species became extinct, the worst hit were those that produced calcium carbonate skeletons.
Phil. says:
August 22, 2010 at 9:03 am
No it’s a sign that chemists who know what they’re talking about wrote the report.
============================================
Phil, chemists have a really hard time describing what goes on in the real world. They have all that biology in the way that they don’t understand.
Here’s a decent read on the topic from “Chemical & Engineering News,” one of my favorite industry journals:
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/87/8708sci2.html
Corals, echinoderms & coccolithophores ain’t nearly as huggable as poor, starving polar bears huddled onto a shrinking ice-cube of a floe, but this is the ammunition EPA will use to slam home Clean Water Act regulations on GHG emissions.
Now, the Chinese & Indians ain’t participating, so we will shoot our industries in the feet and put ourselves at a global competitive disadvantage…don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Gosh Phil, I wish I was clever like you. I stand corrected even though I don’t understand most of your correction.
So you see, like most of the public I don’t understand chemistry to the extent that you obviously do. I was talking about the impression I get from the phrase “acidification of the oceans” and also from “acid rain”, and I suspect I am not alone in that.
Scientists need to understand that the public can easily misinterpret what they say, on a whole range of levels (probability, effect, timescales etc) and react in a variety of ways, both rational and irrational.
To give you an example of what this can do, I cite the case in a radio phone-in on BBC radio 4 a few weeks ago, on the subject of climate change, where a woman phoned who was almost in tears because no-one had come to the same conclusion as her that women should no longer have children because it would be unfair to bring them into a warmed world. This woman genuinely believed that the UK would be unsuitabe for children as a consequence of global warming.
Back to your points.
So I took your advice and looked up Permian Extinction, and what I found was that ocean acidification was one of a number of possible causes of the extinction of marine species – so back to my point, there is no certainty here despite you presenting me with information which gave me the impression were facts.
What is also clear is that although this was catastrophic for individual species, life did not cease on Earth. The human race ultimately developed, and arguably it may not have done if the Permian Extinction hadn’t happened.
What I also learned was that this extinction wasn’t unique, and others had occurred earlier, all with the same end result, recovery.
So what makes you think that every species has a right to survive, and I include mankind in this. The history of this planet is one of the rise and fall of species of all types, adaption to changing environments, but throughout it all, continuation of life on the planet.
Sounds like a pretty positive outcome to me.
That’s its denotation, but its connotation is that it’s turning into lemon juice. I suggest putting the word inside quotation marks, as a signal that it mustn’t be taken as meaning “becoming sour (acid).”
“Global mean ocean surface pH has already decreased from around 8.2 in 1750 to 8.1 today (remember than a decrease in pH corresponds to an increase in acidity).”
Two things about this one statement stand out:
1. The use of “already,” which implies an ongoing process that is leading rapidly to more of a decrease in pH.
2. The erroneous parenthetical statement that decreased pH equals increased acidity, delivered as if aimed at little kiddies.
By this one statement alone we can infer that the authors are aiming their declarations at children, and intend to convey a sense of urgency. Hey kids, your parents and other old people (or even worse, dead people!) have left you with this really messed up planet, and you need to join the fascist youth party to add your uninformed voice to the propagenda(TM) war.
Well, as a reformed cowboy, I will eschew all scatological references and merely say that I abhor the current practice of trying to build science out of TinkerToy™ models. It is a sick joke … I have been actively programming computers since I wrote my first program in 1963. A computer model is merely the programmer’s insights, intuitions, and prejudices made solid. As such it is not, and can never be, a substitute for observations. Building an entire “scientific” study out of nothing but computer results should be against the law. Since it is not, we should simply point and laugh …
Not sure if anyone is still reading this, but I corresponded with Jo Nova on this a few months ago. I promised her some references. A pretty good one came out a little later, so I bought it from Science. I’ve put it in FileDropper if anyone wants to read it.
Ocean acidification: Unprecedented, unsettling by Richard A. Kerr
It does a pretty good job of clarifying the “acidification” term.
Richard Telford
“Two huge errors here. First, you are assuming that the oceans are well mixed. There’s not. Most of the ocean has a mixed layer depth of less than 100m. On policy relevant time scales it is the acidification of this surface layer that is relevant. Second, it is the cumulative emissions that are a cause for concern, not one year’s of emissions.
If you don’t like it, don’t write it.”
In a single instant of time, the oceans do not mix well. Over days, weeks, months or years, there is constant mixing through a variety of currents right down to the abyssal depths. Ocean currents are everywhere, if they weren’t, life could not exist at all levels in the oceans.
Also, I used figures for a century to make my point and then assumed all the CO2 was absorbed by just 10% of the ocean to further make my point, which is: scare stories about CO2 acidification of the oceans are baseless and an obvious hoax to anyone with the slightest bit of scientific sense.
As you say: “If you don’t like it, don’t write it.”
If the oceans aren’t well mixed, how come they are oxygenated everywhere, at every depth? That oxygen can only have come from the atmosphere, or from photosynthesizing organisms up in the photic zone. And apparently the mixing is fast enough that there is never time for the organisms in the sea to use the oxygen up.
OK there is one exception: the Black Sea, where major fresh-water influx from several large rivers, and an almost non-existent connection with other oceans means that a stable stratification is possible.
tty says:
August 23, 2010 at 7:39 am
If the oceans aren’t well mixed, how come they are oxygenated everywhere, at every depth? That oxygen can only have come from the atmosphere, or from photosynthesizing organisms up in the photic zone. And apparently the mixing is fast enough that there is never time for the organisms in the sea to use the oxygen up.
The oceans aren’t well mixed and certainly aren’t ‘oxygenated everywhere, at every depth’. On average the oxygen concentration drops from saturation at the surface to a minimum around ~1000m depth, the depletion is caused by organic detritus being oxidised on the way down. That’s mostly used up by that level and the deep water oxygen levels are rather higher due to deep ocean currents.
Check out the “Oxygen minimum zone”.
Charles Higley (August 21, 2010 at 12:34 pm) pointed out what I believe to be the most important problem that those who predict that increasing carbon dioxide concentration in the ocean causes acidification and that the acidification will increase the solubility of calcium carbonate. It seems to me that increasing carbon dioxide will increase the concentration of carbonate ion which will result in calcium carbonate becoming less soluble and therefore easier to precipitate. Is this not the result of a solubility product constant calculation? The excess protons generated are not significant, the product of the calcium ion concentration times the carbonate ion concentration is a constant.
You can increase the solubility of calcium carbonate by using a mineral acid (HCl, eg) to decrease the pH, but what that does is reduce the concentration of carbonate (see the pretty bubbles) which allows an increase in calcium ion concentration, i.e. dissolution of calcium carbonate.
I’ll weigh in with some chemistry:
A change from pH 8.2 in 1790 to 8.1 in 2010 is a change in H+ concentration (in moles per liter) from 6 x 10 exp -9 to 7 x 10 exp -9, or a change of 1 x 10 exp -9. If it goes to 7.8 by 2100 (not that I am stipulating that) the new concentration will be 15 x 10 exp -9, or roughly twice the H+ concentration. So, yes, would be an addition of acid, but these pHs are all still in the alkaline range. I would expect life can handle such slight shifts in pH.
As to if these pHs will actually happen, the calcium/bicarbonate/carbonate/CO2 system is known as a “buffer”, that is it can absorb acidic contributions with little change in pH due to reserve alkalinity, like it is in the oceans. More calculations to follow…..