Don’t laugh, that’s what the Geological Society of America is pushing these days to describe the “ocean acidification problem”…from their press release:
Earth on Acid: The Present & Future of Global Acidification
GSA Annual Meeting & Exposition, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, 4–7 November 2012
Boulder, CO, USA – Climate change and extreme weather events grab the headlines, but there is another, lesser known, global change underway on land, in the seas, and in the air: acidification.
It turns out that combustion of fossil fuels, smelting of ores, mining of coal and metal ores, and application of nitrogen fertilizer to soils are all driving down the pH of the air, water, and the soil at rates far faster than Earth’s natural systems can buffer, posing threats to both land and sea life.
“It’s a bigger picture than most of us know,” says Janet Herman of the Department of Environmental Sciences at University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Herman and her colleague, Karen Rice of the USGS, discovered that despite the fact that they worked on different kinds of acidification in the environment, they were not well informed about the matter beyond their own specialties. So they have done an extensive review of science papers about all kinds of environmental acidification and are presenting their work in a poster session on Tuesday, 6 Nov., at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA.
Acidification is both a local and global problem, since it can be as close as a nearby stream contaminated by mine tailings or as far-reaching as the world’s oceans, which are becoming more acidic as sea water absorbs higher concentrations of carbon dioxide that humans dump into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
Coal gives a double whammy by being the biggest contributor of anthropogenic carbon dioxide to the global atmosphere as well as creating regional acidification. Coal burning is famous for creating acid rain, which had dramatic environmental impacts on forests, streams, and lakes in eastern North America and Europe and led to major policy changes.
“It’s not at all clear that other regions are considering such policy restrictions to be important,” Herman says, regarding places where population growth is expected to increase acidifying activities.
Normally, acids in the environment are buffered by alkaline compounds released by the weathering of minerals in rocks. The problem today, according to Herman, is that the rate of acidification by human activities has outstripped the weathering rate and buffering capacity of the planet.
In their work, Herman and Rice look at the population projections by country over the next four decades to see where the increased industrialization and agriculture will likely lead to new acidification hot spots. Their hope is that by doing this people can anticipate the problem and plan to mitigate the harmful environmental effects, says Herman.
WHAT: Acidification of Earth: An Assessment across Mechanisms and Scales
WHEN: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Tuesday, 6 Nov.
WHERE: Booth #67, Charlotte Convention Center: Hall B
ABSTRACT: https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2012AM/finalprogram/abstract_207495.htm
Source: http://www.geosociety.org/news/pr/12-89.htm
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Howskepticalment;
I support the idea of comparing two broad policy settings: AGW prevention and AGW adaptation
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I said nothing about adaptation. What I said was to compare to the consequences of a low carbon economy which would kill billions. That’s the part that you and your ilk gloss over. Once one gets that issue properly understood, it puts the mitigation versus adaptation argument in proper perspective. There is no mitigation option to debate in the first place unless you are prepared to advocate genocide.
Smokey says:November 6, 2012 at 11:17 pm
Good to see you are still pumping air. I wondered where had all the ‘clicky’s gone?
The problem is that there’s no entry for “acidification” or “ocean acidification” under the “Category” drop-down list of tags in the sidebar. And “ocean” is too big a haystack. (I posted a note to this effect in Tips and Notes a an hour or two ago.)
Interestingly, the ocean seems to be most ‘acidic’ (actually leeast alkaline) at about 1000 m depth.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/ocean-ph-along-transect.jpg
The surface waters are unambiguously more alkaline at all latitudes than the waters below which are inaccessible to CO2.
The acid ocean alarmists are consistently wrong at applying the principles of chemistry to the CO2/bicarbonate/carbonate equilibrium in water.
Adding CO2 to water also ADDS bicarbonate and carbonate – just to lesser amounts depending on the pH. At the pH of 8.4 (a typical pH for sea water) most (about 98%) of the CO2 is in the form of bicarbonate, and only about 1% each is carbonic acid or carbonate.
The bicarbonate is the form that is biologically available for marine animals. Carbonate itself is too strong ionically to be used for building skeletons or shells. The carbonate form prevails at a pH higher than 10.4, a region where corals and forams don’t thrive.
I’m no expert, but I think I’m an acid base life form. The acid in my stomach seems to think so anyway. Thank the lord for Zantac!
Strange, isn’t it, that carbon-alarmists don’t like to accept historical wet-chemical measurements of atmospheric CO2, yet think it is OK to do so when measuring in the more complex environment of the ocean. It speaks volumes.
Let’s see if I can remember my old chemical engineering…
Solution of a gas in a liquid is governed by Dalton’s law of partial pressures, so linear increase in atmospheric concentration will cause linear increase in dissolved gas.
However, increase in temperature will cause the dissolved gas to be emitted non-linearly with increasing temperature (Van ‘t Hoff’s law?) as a result of thermodynamics.
So the Warmists are definitely trying to have their cake and eat it.
@Willis
“Someone upthread described bathing in Japan in very acid waters. These waters had a pH of 1.5, far below neutral (pH 7.0). ”
That was me. The place is called Kawaharage. The volcano drainage joins the mountain stream at 98C. At the waterfall, it is down to about 38C and pH1.4-1.5.
People have been bathing in hot acid there for the past 1200 years. It’s very good for the skin, especially irritating infections like crutch rot and athletes foot. No-one has been known to dissolve, yet. Japanese take public safety very seriously, and there’s a full water analysis posted at the start of the walk in.
Regards.
Tadchem,
The alarmists seem equally ignorant about biochemistry and the much, much greater pH ranges that are maintained inside and between the organelles of living cells.
They seem no less ignorant of chemical thermodynamics and the energy required to make pH changes in water the further one gets from the pKa of water. A change of pH from 7.0 to 7.1 is less energetic than a change from 8.0 to 8.1, but we are supposed to be frightened that the pH of the oceans might (might!) become more like water.
There isn’t even an election happening today. What’s their excuse now?
Howskepticalment: You claimed you were a farmer. No farmer would call his field a paddock, which is a horse pen, lime or no lime. To claim that farmers farm paddocks is more rubbish. So the question arises of whether you are just a glib fabricator. I do not wish to seem uncharitable, so I will allow the plea that you simply do not know what you are talking about.
Howskepticalment says:
November 6, 2012 at 7:33 pm
Sorry, but that’s nothing more than ignorant scare mongering. Even the slightest research into biological processes and the ph of blood in various organisms would show that we are currently in a time of relatively HIGH ph. So at worst we could move towards normal.
mpainter says:
November 7, 2012 at 7:08 am
Howskepticalment: You claimed you were a farmer. No farmer would call his field a paddock,
An small education. The gentlemen is from Australia or N.Z. where a farmer’s field is called….a paddock. Probably before your revolutionary war your ancestors called them paddocks, too.
The excess CO2 emitted into the atmosphere 56 million years ago knocked back the pankton
shells of that time. The increased acidity caused the solubility of CaCO3 to increase thus killing most of them. For more on this look up the PETM a warming even that last about 150,000 years due to a sudden burst of carbon. Yes, indeed, the Earth’s oceans can be set on a “bad acid trip” by the emissions of CO2. The amount of C emitted then is thought to be approximately equal to that would would be emitted by the total use of exi sting sources of our fossil fuels. Look it up yourself. It all pretty clear and well documented via geological and fossil studies of the oceans and land everywhere on the planet.
Gary Pearse says:
We were populated from all parts of the British isles, so doubtless various usages were encountered then. However, the Saxon word meant “enclosure” according to my dictionary, and that meaning is still current, so perhaps the usage of paddock to mean a cultivated field is a recent development Down Under. Thanks for the education, and thanks for your memoirs on your field excusions in Manitoba, which I enjoyed. Most interesting about the Missouri and the fossil barchan.
In my opinion, comments about “ocean acidification” tend to be very narrowly focused and miss the big picture, that is this planet has an enormous and powerful capacity to maintain homeostasis through both abiotic and biotic mechanisms, especially in the oceans. Remember that the relationships of the ocean constituents are relatively constant and stable, even though individual constituents might fluctuate as various environmental factors (e.g. temperature, pH, buffer intensity, redox potential, pressure, etc.) change. Also the oceans are different in composition than freshwater; note that if you evaporate freshwater down to seawater salinity you will not have ocean water, and a number of constituents will have precipitated. The ocean is an open system in equilibrium with the atmosphere as well as intimately integrated in a number of geochemical cycles, not just the carbon cycle. The ocean is affected by the sediments, using them for deposition and dissolution. It might be good for WUWT to offer a link to a discussion on the carbonic acid system, buffering, and the geochemical cycles. Here’s the way I look at it: If the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere were to double (380 ppm to 760 ppm) and if all other things stay the same, then as the CO2 equilibrates with the ocean, the H+ concentration in the ocean will approach a doubling. Mathematically, the pH scale is logarithmic so this would change the pH by only 0.3 units (ocean water is about pH 8.2-8.3 and it takes a ten-fold change in H+ to get a 1 pH unit change). However, the complexity of interactions between precipitates (calcite and aragonite especially), sediments, N and S cycles, and the biology will temper this change. For example, both calcite and aragonite are supersaturated in the oceans (two to four-fold) and will tend to dissolve to preserve the original pH (buffering), and sediments might release P thereby generating an algal bloom which would then remove CO2 directly or by converting bicarbonate to CO2 with carbonic anhydrase. The point is that we know so very little about the “big picture” that comments about the little details seem meaningless to me.
Fertilizer. Runoff. Any questions?
RE: I could point to a potentially real “end-of-the-world.” That will
be when all CO2 is locked up in limestone and chalk. Ever wondered
where all that CO2 back from when it was 2000 ppm in the atmosphere
went to? Have a look at the chalk deposits and limestones around the
world. There’s all the locked-up CO2. It doesn’t seem to unlock at any-
where near the speed with which it was locked up!
This. We ultimately are doomed it’s just a matter of when. We either will colonize space or die out slowly stuck on the 3rd Rock.
mpainter says:
November 7, 2012 at 7:08 am
Howskepticalment: You claimed you were a farmer. No farmer would call his field a paddock, which is a horse pen, lime or no lime. To claim that farmers farm paddocks is more rubbish. So the question arises of whether you are just a glib fabricator. I do not wish to seem uncharitable, so I will allow the plea that you simply do not know what you are talking about.
It does get tiresome that I try to discuss AGW issues and folk like mpainter respond with personal abuse.
Gary Pearse hit this nail on the head. (BTW, we just got an inch of rain which will not make the wheat growers happy because they are harvesting and rain reduces grain quality and price; but it will make those running stock happy because it will keep the grass growing for another fortnight).
Incidentally, this particular issue does bring home to me something that has been at the back of mind – WUWT posters do tend to be Northern Hemisphere folk in general and US folk in particular.
churning
Good post, IMHO, except that it implicitly argues for adaptation of AGW without considering prevention of AGW. The two main difficulties I have with your POV are:
(1) homeostasis can be at vastly different settings and can last for a long time. Therefore we might not get what we like with AGW, even if it eventually does reach a new homeostasis level;
(2) getting to homeostasis can involve rapid rates of change and increased volatility.
IMHO, the risks inherent in adaptation outweigh the comfort factor of doing nothing.
ericgrimsrud says:
November 7, 2012 at 10:00 am
————————
Try again.
“In shallower waters, it’s undeniable that increased CO2 levels result in a decreased oceanic pH, which has a profound negative effect on corals.[21] Experiments suggest it is also very harmful to calcifying plankton.[22] However, the strong acids used to simulate the natural increase in acidity which would result from elevated CO2 concentrations may have given misleading results, and the most recent evidence is that coccolithophores (E. huxleyi at least) become more, not less, calcified and abundant in acidic waters.[23] Interestingly, no change in the distribution of calcareous nanoplankton such as the coccolithophores can be attributed to acidification during the PETM.[23] Acidification did lead to an abundance of heavily calcified algae[24] and weakly calcified forams.[25]”
How now, skepticalment.
You should not complain about personal abuse when I invite you to disavow flimsy scientific rubbish. I would think that you would feel some gratitude for the opportunity of correction. Let’s try again. The so-called Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was a lengthy period of some millions of years during which temperatures averaged 8-12 degrees C above today. In this era life flourished at levels much above what is seen during the Pleistocene. The higher latitudes particularly flourished in this way. This proves the benefits of a warmer world. No problems with CO2, even though it was at much elevated levels, which is why these alarms about CO2 is rubbish (this is not say that CO2 caused this era of elevated temperature- it didn’t) And what happened to this earthly paradise? Well, at the end of the Eocene it turned cold. This was the Oligocene era. This change is demarcated in the fossil record by widespread and massive extinctions. Note that the warmth brought flourishing life and cool brought the scythe of death. That a warmer, more humid clime fosters life and biotic diversity is such a well-established principle that I am surprised that you deprecate this principle as a “strawman”, (and please don’t feel like you have to apologize for that snide and unnecessary remark). Although, having dismissed it as a “strawman”, you then proceeded to attempt a lengthy refutation of this principle which attempt was, if not rubbish, certainly something that you should consider repudiating (go read your comment and see if you don’t wish to change what you posted.). By the way, what is the latest word on the Maldives? Are they still in danger of drowning? wuwt 11-7-12.
The ocean’s water has had roughly the same composition and pH range for over 500Ma. During that time the atmospheric CO2 content has varied by thousands of PPMV. This great variation made no fundamental change to sea water. The pH range remained the same as today.
John MarshallThe ocean’s water has had roughly the same composition and pH range for over 500Ma. During that time the atmospheric CO2 content has varied by thousands of PPMV. This great variation made no fundamental change to sea water. The pH range remained the same as today.
*************************
This is exactly the point I was trying to make, but apparently skepticalment missed it.
Too many irons (ions?) in the fire and no time to do it but pretend the ocean is distilled water at ph 7. Take all the concievable human carbon, sulphur, halogen, etc potential protons contributed to the atmosphere since 1850. Dissolve it all in a volume of the above water representing 70% of the earth’s surface to a depth of 800m (the average mixed layer). What is the resulting ph?
Also, everyone always forgets the enormous contribution to ocean pCO2 from upwelling.
Roger Knights says:
November 7, 2012 at 5:35 am
Hey, Roger. You might start with The Ocean Is Not Getting Acidified. Then there’s The Electric Oceanic Acid Test. Finally, I discuss it further in The Reef Abides.
Hope that is of some assistance,
w.