8 ms·

A World Without Coral Reefs

116 points by raymondh 14y ago

ScottBurson 14y ago
Is it completely ridiculous to imagine that ocean acidification could be countered? I'm imagining something like having cargo ships sprinkle sodium hydroxide in their wakes. Could any such plan be workable?
- harshreality 14y ago
  It appears pH is only one part of the problem.
  - ScottBurson 14y ago
    Yes, I understand that. But there's something to be said for tackling the easiest problem first. If a relatively straightforward geoengineering solution is available, I think we should go ahead and apply it, and then turn our attentions to the more politically and economically difficult problems of overfishing and pollution.
    - MartinCron 14y ago
      There are so many second, third, and fourth order effects to any change that you make of any meaningful scale. Humans just don't understand the reef well enough.
      - ScottBurson 14y ago
        We're already changing the applicable conditions. Not changing them is not an option at this point. I understand there are always risks to sticking our fingers into something we don't understand well. But those risks have to be weighed against the risks of inaction, which seem in this situation to be quite substantial. I suggested sodium hydroxide because adding sodium ions to the ocean is obviously benign. Seems to me the greatest risk from doing this is that the concentrated alkalinity will kill marine life before it disperses. I don't know whether that's a show-stopper. I also haven't penciled out the numbers to see how much NaOH would be required, and how that compares to current world production. I have no idea whether this is practical. But I think we should be asking these kinds of questions.
        MartinCron 14y ago
        I actually have some experience with this on a very small scale. To raise the pH of my 30 gallon reef tank, I add a tiny amount of a product that is mostly NaHCO and Na2CO3. Still, it is complex and scary, and I have had better success by increasing flow and surface agitation for better oxygen exchange. Just like I would prefer to have less CO2 in our atmosphere.
- ams6110 14y ago
  A cargo shipload of sodium hydroxide dumped into the ocean would be like a drop in a swimming pool. Insignificant.
- illumin8 14y ago
  Not really. The core issue is that Co2 creates an acidic environment and lowers pH levels. It would be like trying to clear a room filled with poison gas by blowing bubbles filled with oxygen...
- saalweachter 14y ago
  The most straight-forward way to counter ocean acidification is to reduce the amount of atmospheric CO2. If the atmospheric concentration shifts, the ocean will release the CO2 it's absorbed and its pH will go up. Granted, that's a pretty tall order. Ideally, we would reduce the atmospheric CO2 from ~400ppm (where it's out now) to 200ppm (where it was before the whole industrial revolution began). At the very least, we probably want to reverse the current trend of +2.0ppm / year to (say) -2.0ppm / year, so hopefully we skim under whatever the wire is. Some researches claim that the Little Ice Age was caused by the reforestation of the Americas after Europeans accidentally killed all of the Americans who were keeping the content pretty clear of trees. [1] It is estimated that reforesting the Americas sucked about 6ppm to 10ppm of CO2 out of the atmosphere. So one way to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere is to grow a lot of trees (or other plant life). And then do that every year for about a century; it's not enough to simply reforest even the entire world once, because that would probably only suck (say) 20ppm of CO2 out of the atmosphere, a mere tenth of the target. So after you grow your primordial forest, you need to chop it all down, bury it (or do anything else with the wood that doesn't release its carbon back into the atmosphere), and then plant a new forest, and keep doing it over and over again for however long it takes to get the atmospheric CO2 levels to where you want them to be. So it's possible to counter ocean acidification, and maybe not even that hard (hell, you're even creating a bit of a "wood rush", since you're going to have lumber coming out of your ears by the time you've regrown enough trees to cover the world ten times over), but I don't really see it happening. ETA: Based on the figures for tree productivity [2] it looks like you'd need to add about 90 million square km (5% of the Earth's land area) of forests operating at peak productivity to go from +2ppm to -2ppm atmospheric CO2. [1] http://phys.org/news/2011-10-team-european-ice-age-due.html http://phys.org/news/2011-10-team-european-ice-age-due.html [2] http://www.safnet.org/answer/kids_corner.cfm http://www.safnet.org/answer/kids_corner.cfm
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    Two points about the Little Ice Age: 1) There is no consensus as to whether it was global or just hemispheric and 2) At least in Europe, it was well underway by the 1200's, so the timing with that theory is off.
- jurjenh 14y ago
  As a result of doing that, you'd be transferring the CO2 from the oceans back into the atmosphere. I'm still unsure about the appropriate process of dealing with all the CO2 released over the last ~200 years - it originally came from somewhere, I'd imagine likely the atmosphere - then over millions of years it was sequestered into the earth through coal and oil. And we've undone that sequestering in a very rapid manner, over approx 200 years, an instant in geological terms. I'd say the hammer stroke hasn't even started ringing yet, and we haven't even begun to see the changes that we've unleashed - and who knows what they might be? So many unknown unknowns there... and we're attempting to throw our best minds at it, yet we're also still very much continuing with our current trajectory.
yaakov34 14y ago
I really recommend reading the thread at http://coris.noaa.gov/exchanges/coralfuture/coral_future.pdf http://coris.noaa.gov/exchanges/coralfuture/coral_future.pdf - this is a discussion by working scientists, and although it's from 2001, the predictions of the demise of coral reefs were already very current then. It's a good introduction to the huge complexity of reasoning about these systems, which involve more feedback loops than a non-expert can even imagine. What I take away from that discussion is that there is no serious researcher in the field who doesn't see the coral reefs disappearing at a huge rate, but there is no consensus about the dominant mechanism; I think (although I am not an expert) that the arguments of those who see pollution and overfishing as the main cause are more persuasive. For example, a very large fraction of coral reefs around Sri Lanka disappeared in the 1990s, and this apparently had more to do with the fact that people blasted them and hauled them away to be used as limestone in the construction industry, than with any subtle changes in the pH of seawater. In the (very plausible) opinion of some of the scientists from that discussion, most coral reefs will die off long before the pH changes really become significant. It would be great if someone who is a researcher in this field could give us some more recent results and data.
- ckuehne 14y ago
  "It would be great if someone who is a researcher in this field could give us some more recent results and data." There you go: Reef winners and losers in a warmer world: http://www-public.jcu.edu.au/news/JCU_099903 http://www-public.jcu.edu.au/news/JCU_099903
javajosh 14y ago
This is a marketing piece masquerading as advocacy. What's the difference? An advocate won't personally profit from the course of action they are recommending. A marketer will. I say this because this man's conclusion is, basically, "The coral reefs are disappearing. Fund my research more." This does, of course, put research scientists into a bit of a bind. Presumably, since they are the ones looking at these systems in detail, they are the "early warning system" for any catastrophic change. When they see catastrophe, what should a research scientist do? Write an op-ed piece in the Times asking for more research funding? I don't think so. I think the correct move is to complete the fucking research. "Completion" means to come up with some really solid conclusions, and if the system is on course to do something nasty, to have a list of actionable steps to change it. Then, you advocate that list of actionable steps, citing your research as the basis for it. Presumably, you will NOT personally profit from those steps (except, perhaps, as a consultant). Now, I can hear the objectivist/egoist hacker contingent's hackles raise - why shouldn't a research scientist profit from their research? Was not that their blood and tears and insight? Actually, I think that should be open for them - but they should call it marketing, not advocacy, and it should be clearly a matter of personal enrichment. The thing that an objectivist should focus on is the hypocrisy of a "call to action" masquerading as altruistic concern over the environment, when it is really a quite selfish concern for securing one's own funding source. It's not that I'm against securing one's own funding source, but to do it under the guise of advocacy is flat out wrong.
- skybrian 14y ago
  Cite? I've never heard of anyone becoming rich because their research was funded.
  - jballanc 14y ago
    They don't. Salaries are typically dictated by the funding agency or the university. Research funding often goes toward purchasing equipment and materials, but the bulk of it goes toward paying graduate student stipends and postdoc and technician salaries. Typically, the only way a researcher can get "rich" off of their research is if they write a book or go on a speaking tour.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mmphosis 14y ago
A World Without...
mkl 14y ago
This TED talk is relevant and very interesting/disheartening: "Jeremy Jackson: How we wrecked the ocean", http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_jackson.html http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_jackson.html It was enough to make me stop eating fish.
cageface 14y ago
There must be some way hackers can help do something about things like this. Maybe a Kiva for environmental issues or something? Surely some of the brainpower we're burning on social media and cute mobile apps could be redirected this way.
nkoren 14y ago
It's worth noting that a world without coral reefs is hardly unprecedented. Approximately 14,000 years ago, every coral reef in the world would have been destroyed by Meltwater Pulse 1A[1], an event which caused sea levels to rise by 20 metres in just a few hundred years. Although this must have caused the demise of the complex reef ecosystems, coral itself survived, presumably as isolated individuals and very small clusters. Afterwards, sea levels continued to rise rapidly, and the large reefs that we have today could not become established until about 7,000 years ago, when the sea levels finally stabilised. The corresponding ecosystems have evolved only since then. For this reason, I am mostly unconvinced that the (admittedly horrible) disruption which we are causing today will irrevocably knock things back to a precambrian state. When you look at history of our planet over evolutionary timescales, you see all kinds of disruptive events -- rapidly rising or falling seas; bolide impacts as powerful as tens of millions of nuclear bombs -- which the planet has managed to shrug off with apparent ease. With one exception, most of the harm we are causing seems to be along these lines. So even if the great reefs die off, then my expectation would be that coral itself would continue to survive in niches. 10,000 years from now -- long after we've wised up or died off -- there could very well be great reefs again, and our disruption would be relegated to a small blip in the overall evolutionary record. The planet's losses will ultimately be minimal; the real losers will be our children, who will inherit a less beautiful and wondrous world than the one we know. I've swum through coral reefs, and it's painful to think that the next few dozen generations won't be able to experience that kind of beauty. But from the planet's perspective -- looking at evolutionary timescales -- this may not be a particularly big deal. The one real and substantial caveat to my nonchalance is ocean acidification. It is truly global compared to other forms of ocean pollution, acts as a disruptor to individual cells rather than to the (more resilient than we give them credit for) ecosystem relationships, and is making an excursion that may be unprecedented in the past 300 million years. In contrast to things like changes in sea levels and temperatures -- which actually happen all the time when you take the long view -- evolutionary timescales give no assurance that ocean acidification will be a survivable event. It is something that merits a much higher level of attention than it's getting. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltwater_pulse_1A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltwater_pulse_1A

116 points by raymondh 14y ago

Is it completely ridiculous to imagine that ocean acidification could be countered? I'm imagining something like having cargo ships sprinkle sodium hydroxide in their wakes. Could any such plan be workable?

harshreality 14y ago
It appears pH is only one part of the problem.
- ScottBurson 14y ago
  Yes, I understand that. But there's something to be said for tackling the easiest problem first. If a relatively straightforward geoengineering solution is available, I think we should go ahead and apply it, and then turn our attentions to the more politically and economically difficult problems of overfishing and pollution.
  - MartinCron 14y ago
    There are so many second, third, and fourth order effects to any change that you make of any meaningful scale. Humans just don't understand the reef well enough.
    - ScottBurson 14y ago
      We're already changing the applicable conditions. Not changing them is not an option at this point. I understand there are always risks to sticking our fingers into something we don't understand well. But those risks have to be weighed against the risks of inaction, which seem in this situation to be quite substantial. I suggested sodium hydroxide because adding sodium ions to the ocean is obviously benign. Seems to me the greatest risk from doing this is that the concentrated alkalinity will kill marine life before it disperses. I don't know whether that's a show-stopper. I also haven't penciled out the numbers to see how much NaOH would be required, and how that compares to current world production. I have no idea whether this is practical. But I think we should be asking these kinds of questions.
      - MartinCron 14y ago
        I actually have some experience with this on a very small scale. To raise the pH of my 30 gallon reef tank, I add a tiny amount of a product that is mostly NaHCO and Na2CO3. Still, it is complex and scary, and I have had better success by increasing flow and surface agitation for better oxygen exchange. Just like I would prefer to have less CO2 in our atmosphere.
ams6110 14y ago
A cargo shipload of sodium hydroxide dumped into the ocean would be like a drop in a swimming pool. Insignificant.
illumin8 14y ago
Not really. The core issue is that Co2 creates an acidic environment and lowers pH levels. It would be like trying to clear a room filled with poison gas by blowing bubbles filled with oxygen...
saalweachter 14y ago
The most straight-forward way to counter ocean acidification is to reduce the amount of atmospheric CO2. If the atmospheric concentration shifts, the ocean will release the CO2 it's absorbed and its pH will go up. Granted, that's a pretty tall order. Ideally, we would reduce the atmospheric CO2 from ~400ppm (where it's out now) to 200ppm (where it was before the whole industrial revolution began). At the very least, we probably want to reverse the current trend of +2.0ppm / year to (say) -2.0ppm / year, so hopefully we skim under whatever the wire is. Some researches claim that the Little Ice Age was caused by the reforestation of the Americas after Europeans accidentally killed all of the Americans who were keeping the content pretty clear of trees. [1] It is estimated that reforesting the Americas sucked about 6ppm to 10ppm of CO2 out of the atmosphere. So one way to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere is to grow a lot of trees (or other plant life). And then do that every year for about a century; it's not enough to simply reforest even the entire world once, because that would probably only suck (say) 20ppm of CO2 out of the atmosphere, a mere tenth of the target. So after you grow your primordial forest, you need to chop it all down, bury it (or do anything else with the wood that doesn't release its carbon back into the atmosphere), and then plant a new forest, and keep doing it over and over again for however long it takes to get the atmospheric CO2 levels to where you want them to be. So it's possible to counter ocean acidification, and maybe not even that hard (hell, you're even creating a bit of a "wood rush", since you're going to have lumber coming out of your ears by the time you've regrown enough trees to cover the world ten times over), but I don't really see it happening. ETA: Based on the figures for tree productivity [2] it looks like you'd need to add about 90 million square km (5% of the Earth's land area) of forests operating at peak productivity to go from +2ppm to -2ppm atmospheric CO2. [1] http://phys.org/news/2011-10-team-european-ice-age-due.html http://phys.org/news/2011-10-team-european-ice-age-due.html [2] http://www.safnet.org/answer/kids_corner.cfm http://www.safnet.org/answer/kids_corner.cfm
- einhverfr 14y ago
  Two points about the Little Ice Age: 1) There is no consensus as to whether it was global or just hemispheric and 2) At least in Europe, it was well underway by the 1200's, so the timing with that theory is off.
jurjenh 14y ago
As a result of doing that, you'd be transferring the CO2 from the oceans back into the atmosphere. I'm still unsure about the appropriate process of dealing with all the CO2 released over the last ~200 years - it originally came from somewhere, I'd imagine likely the atmosphere - then over millions of years it was sequestered into the earth through coal and oil. And we've undone that sequestering in a very rapid manner, over approx 200 years, an instant in geological terms. I'd say the hammer stroke hasn't even started ringing yet, and we haven't even begun to see the changes that we've unleashed - and who knows what they might be? So many unknown unknowns there... and we're attempting to throw our best minds at it, yet we're also still very much continuing with our current trajectory.

yaakov34 14y ago

I really recommend reading the thread at http://coris.noaa.gov/exchanges/coralfuture/coral_future.pdf http://coris.noaa.gov/exchanges/coralfuture/coral_future.pdf - this is a discussion by working scientists, and although it's from 2001, the predictions of the demise of coral reefs were already very current then. It's a good introduction to the huge complexity of reasoning about these systems, which involve more feedback loops than a non-expert can even imagine. What I take away from that discussion is that there is no serious researcher in the field who doesn't see the coral reefs disappearing at a huge rate, but there is no consensus about the dominant mechanism; I think (although I am not an expert) that the arguments of those who see pollution and overfishing as the main cause are more persuasive. For example, a very large fraction of coral reefs around Sri Lanka disappeared in the 1990s, and this apparently had more to do with the fact that people blasted them and hauled them away to be used as limestone in the construction industry, than with any subtle changes in the pH of seawater. In the (very plausible) opinion of some of the scientists from that discussion, most coral reefs will die off long before the pH changes really become significant. It would be great if someone who is a researcher in this field could give us some more recent results and data.

ckuehne 14y ago
"It would be great if someone who is a researcher in this field could give us some more recent results and data." There you go: Reef winners and losers in a warmer world: http://www-public.jcu.edu.au/news/JCU_099903 http://www-public.jcu.edu.au/news/JCU_099903

javajosh 14y ago

This is a marketing piece masquerading as advocacy. What's the difference? An advocate won't personally profit from the course of action they are recommending. A marketer will. I say this because this man's conclusion is, basically, "The coral reefs are disappearing. Fund my research more." This does, of course, put research scientists into a bit of a bind. Presumably, since they are the ones looking at these systems in detail, they are the "early warning system" for any catastrophic change. When they see catastrophe, what should a research scientist do? Write an op-ed piece in the Times asking for more research funding? I don't think so. I think the correct move is to complete the fucking research. "Completion" means to come up with some really solid conclusions, and if the system is on course to do something nasty, to have a list of actionable steps to change it. Then, you advocate that list of actionable steps, citing your research as the basis for it. Presumably, you will NOT personally profit from those steps (except, perhaps, as a consultant). Now, I can hear the objectivist/egoist hacker contingent's hackles raise - why shouldn't a research scientist profit from their research? Was not that their blood and tears and insight? Actually, I think that should be open for them - but they should call it marketing, not advocacy, and it should be clearly a matter of personal enrichment. The thing that an objectivist should focus on is the hypocrisy of a "call to action" masquerading as altruistic concern over the environment, when it is really a quite selfish concern for securing one's own funding source. It's not that I'm against securing one's own funding source, but to do it under the guise of advocacy is flat out wrong.

skybrian 14y ago
Cite? I've never heard of anyone becoming rich because their research was funded.
- jballanc 14y ago
  They don't. Salaries are typically dictated by the funding agency or the university. Research funding often goes toward purchasing equipment and materials, but the bulk of it goes toward paying graduate student stipends and postdoc and technician salaries. Typically, the only way a researcher can get "rich" off of their research is if they write a book or go on a speaking tour.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

mmphosis 14y ago

A World Without...

mkl 14y ago

This TED talk is relevant and very interesting/disheartening: "Jeremy Jackson: How we wrecked the ocean", http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_jackson.html http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_jackson.html It was enough to make me stop eating fish.

cageface 14y ago

There must be some way hackers can help do something about things like this. Maybe a Kiva for environmental issues or something? Surely some of the brainpower we're burning on social media and cute mobile apps could be redirected this way.

nkoren 14y ago

It's worth noting that a world without coral reefs is hardly unprecedented. Approximately 14,000 years ago, every coral reef in the world would have been destroyed by Meltwater Pulse 1A[1], an event which caused sea levels to rise by 20 metres in just a few hundred years. Although this must have caused the demise of the complex reef ecosystems, coral itself survived, presumably as isolated individuals and very small clusters. Afterwards, sea levels continued to rise rapidly, and the large reefs that we have today could not become established until about 7,000 years ago, when the sea levels finally stabilised. The corresponding ecosystems have evolved only since then. For this reason, I am mostly unconvinced that the (admittedly horrible) disruption which we are causing today will irrevocably knock things back to a precambrian state. When you look at history of our planet over evolutionary timescales, you see all kinds of disruptive events -- rapidly rising or falling seas; bolide impacts as powerful as tens of millions of nuclear bombs -- which the planet has managed to shrug off with apparent ease. With one exception, most of the harm we are causing seems to be along these lines. So even if the great reefs die off, then my expectation would be that coral itself would continue to survive in niches. 10,000 years from now -- long after we've wised up or died off -- there could very well be great reefs again, and our disruption would be relegated to a small blip in the overall evolutionary record. The planet's losses will ultimately be minimal; the real losers will be our children, who will inherit a less beautiful and wondrous world than the one we know. I've swum through coral reefs, and it's painful to think that the next few dozen generations won't be able to experience that kind of beauty. But from the planet's perspective -- looking at evolutionary timescales -- this may not be a particularly big deal. The one real and substantial caveat to my nonchalance is ocean acidification. It is truly global compared to other forms of ocean pollution, acts as a disruptor to individual cells rather than to the (more resilient than we give them credit for) ecosystem relationships, and is making an excursion that may be unprecedented in the past 300 million years. In contrast to things like changes in sea levels and temperatures -- which actually happen all the time when you take the long view -- evolutionary timescales give no assurance that ocean acidification will be a survivable event. It is something that merits a much higher level of attention than it's getting. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltwater_pulse_1A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltwater_pulse_1A