9 ms·

Ocean acidification may cause dramatic changes to phytoplankton

122 points by user_235711 11y ago

tosseraccount 11y ago
Link to actual paper here : http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2722.html http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nc... ( paywall - your tax dollars at work !!! ) This effect of ocean acidification was incorporated into a global marine ecosystem model Are these climate models answering more questions or raising more questions?
chris_va 11y ago
I think OA is probably one of the scariest consequences of excessive CO2. We've already crossed a couple of thresholds. Oyster farming in the Puget Sound, for example, now often involves moving the larvae to Hawaii so they can form their hard shell in a higher PH environment before moving them back.
- rhodysurf 11y ago
  Agreed, and its especially scary because it isn't a consequence laypeople are typically familiar with and thus ignore.
  - tosseraccount 11y ago
    What can we do to educate folks about the ecological threat to large commercial oceanic shell fish farming?
nkoren 11y ago
Ocean acidification scares the crap out of me, in a way that the rest of climate change doesn't. Fact is, a lot of the rest of the chaos that is predicted from climate change is, on a long baseline, a more or less normal state of affairs. So the oceans are going to rise, flooding out couple billion coastal residents over the next 50 years? Sucks for them, sure, but actually that's a slower rate of population-dislocation than we've seen over the last 50 years from rural-urban migrations. Shame about the sunk costs and lost nations and all that, but civilisation has lived through worse, and will go on. So the rising and warming oceans are going to drown the great coral reef ecosystems? No problem -- every coral reef in the world was drowned by the great meltwater pulses at the end of the last Ice Age. They reconstituted themselves after a few thousand years. They can do that again. So the ice-free north pole is going to kill the polar bears? Yeah, probably, most of them -- but there've been ice-free north poles many previous times in the Polar bears' 2.5-million-year evolutionary history. Evidence suggests that during the warmest part of interglacial periods, they hybridise with Grizzlies and then re-speciate when the climate cools down again. They can cope -- and even if they can't, losing an apex predator isn't the worst thing that can happen to an ecosystem. Losing the base of the food chain, however, is. My point is not that climate change isn't real, or that humans aren't causing it, or that the disruptions it will cause won't be horrible and tragic and painful and expensive -- my point is that both ecosystems and civilisations are complex adaptive systems which have already proven themselves to be reasonably robust against exactly these sort of disruptions. Ocean acidification is different than sea level rise and global warming, however. With ocean acidification, we're making an excursion unlike anything the planet has seen in 300 million years. There's simply no precedent that allows us to say "yeah, it's gonna hurt, but the world has already shown that it can cope with this kind of thing". It hasn't. As far as we know, this level of OA could produce a full trophic collapse -- and that isn't something that even I can't be cavalier about, as it would certainly be a civilisation-limiting (and possibly complex-life-limiting) event. Until we know for certain that the impacts of OA will be less severe than this, we should be doing everything we can to stop and reverse it.
- OopsCriticality 11y ago
  I've wondered if part of the problem is that pH is logarithmic, so a drop of, say, 0.2 pH doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
  - jaekwon 11y ago
    I haven't read the article. For the lazy, what sort of level of pH changes are we talking about? Would if affect me if I go swimming in the ocean?
    - OopsCriticality 11y ago
      Not to be critical, but it is in the 1st paragraph: 8.2 (pre-industrial) to 7.8 (projected, 2100).
    - japhyr 11y ago
      Would if affect me if I go swimming in the ocean? No, because you're a large adult organism. But if you were a tiny crustacean, you wouldn't be able to grow a shell. This affects tiny crustaceans, but also the young of large species such as king crabs.
      - prawn 11y ago
        The aquarium in Boston has a hands-on demo for kids about acidification impacting the ability of some creatures to grow their shell. Didn't see anyone else but my son and I trying it though. Hopefully the message gets through to more people, but I think too many people fail to see how it could impact them.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  I think we're going to learn something about evolution But I really expect that simple organisms (like, you know, plankton) will evolve to survive I don't think a small change in ph is as hard for evolution as dealing with the already high amount of salt in oceans The Zebra mussels are probably going to survive as well
fleitz 11y ago
Well, it turns out there's an extremely cheap solution to this that can sequester another 1/3rd of our carbon while making lots of plankton and restocking the oceans with fish. http://planetsave.com/2014/07/02/ocean-fertilization-dangerous-experiment-gone-right/ http://planetsave.com/2014/07/02/ocean-fertilization-dangero...
- eastbayjake 11y ago
  This is fascinating -- I wanted to ask if anyone knew of any geoengineering ideas to deal with rising ocean temperatures and acidity EDIT: The article mentions that "there are also concerns that trapping CO2 at the bottom of the ocean may increase ocean acidification" so I'm not sure if this particular approach is really a solution?
  - acqq 11y ago
    And actually "its potential effectiveness in removing CO2 from the atmosphere remains unproven."
  - pvaldes 11y ago
    Ocean fertilization is an idea discussed from oceanographers since the last twenty years at least.
- nkoren 11y ago
  According to the article, this might be an extremely cheap way of making the problem worse: > There are also concerns that trapping CO2 at the bottom of the ocean may increase ocean acidification ...However it certainly is interesting enough to warrant more research!
- ScottBurson 11y ago
  I'm really glad to see this. I don't know for sure that iron fertilization will turn out to be a good idea, but the opposition to experimenting with it baffles me. It's like people think that we can choose whether or not to engage in geoengineering. No, we can't: we're already doing it (as indeed the article points out). If we can find new interventions that counteract the effects of our existing interventions, that would be a wonderful thing. I think we should be experimenting with both iron fertilization (to sequester carbon and combat ocean acidification) and sulfur aerosols (for cooling). Both of these mimic natural events such as volcanic eruptions; they're not unprecedented in nature.
_red 11y ago
"Acidification" is a purposely alarmist term. (ie. oceans are turning to acid). The pH is slightly moving towards neutral from an alkaline base. I wonder if the continued use of this term by the "climate change industry" is to relay accurate scientific information or just to help increase their funding?
- milesskorpen 11y ago
  > The pH is slightly moving towards neutral from an alkaline base. ... which would be disastrous for a huge chunk of the ocean's ecosystem. "Acidification" seems entirely appropriate; what's the alternative you'd propose?
  - Florin_Andrei 11y ago
    > what's the alternative you'd propose? something something Free Market something something
- OopsCriticality 11y ago
  Acidification is not "purposely alarmist", it is the accurate scientific description of what is happening. pH is logarithmic, so "slightly moving towards neutral" is actually a huge relative change. If anything, the "climate change industry" as you put it are doing a piss poor job of attracting attention to something very scary.
- guscost 11y ago
  "...the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary." - H. L. Mencken
- moultano 11y ago
  Go read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event I don't think any amount of alarm could possibly be enough.
  - 11y ago
jefurii 11y ago
> “If you went to Boston Harbor and pulled up a cup of water and looked under a microscope, you’d see very different species later on,” Dutkiewicz says. “By 2100, you’d see ones that were living maybe closer to North Carolina now, up near Boston.” I hope marine communities are that adaptable. What if the species in North Carolina aren't able to move up to Boston Harbor and they all just die?
storf45 11y ago
Does anyone know if there is additional information on the precision of the measurements? Is the ocean ph going from 8.16 (8.2) to 8.14 (8.1) in this article or is it more dramatic than that? I wasn't able to access the full study because of the pay-wall.
prawn 11y ago
To the few commenters on this page offering a somewhat contrarian view, what's your beef? Is it reactive skepticism, or being contrarian for the sake of it, or having a vested interest in the status quo?
contingencies 11y ago
Coming as it does on the heels of yesterday's sea level warning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927099 this makes me wonder what it takes to take a large chunk of water, maintain a traditional pH, cleanliness and temperature, and grow stuff (fish, algae, seaweed). It seems this is going to be an area with increasing demand, even just betting on the growing population. Anyone interested in doing an aquaculture startup? I have had some ideas in the area (I think fundamentally different to others) already.

122 points by user_235711 11y ago

Link to actual paper here : http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2722.html http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nc... ( paywall - your tax dollars at work !!! ) This effect of ocean acidification was incorporated into a global marine ecosystem model Are these climate models answering more questions or raising more questions?

chris_va 11y ago

I think OA is probably one of the scariest consequences of excessive CO2. We've already crossed a couple of thresholds. Oyster farming in the Puget Sound, for example, now often involves moving the larvae to Hawaii so they can form their hard shell in a higher PH environment before moving them back.

rhodysurf 11y ago
Agreed, and its especially scary because it isn't a consequence laypeople are typically familiar with and thus ignore.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  What can we do to educate folks about the ecological threat to large commercial oceanic shell fish farming?

nkoren 11y ago

Ocean acidification scares the crap out of me, in a way that the rest of climate change doesn't. Fact is, a lot of the rest of the chaos that is predicted from climate change is, on a long baseline, a more or less normal state of affairs. So the oceans are going to rise, flooding out couple billion coastal residents over the next 50 years? Sucks for them, sure, but actually that's a slower rate of population-dislocation than we've seen over the last 50 years from rural-urban migrations. Shame about the sunk costs and lost nations and all that, but civilisation has lived through worse, and will go on. So the rising and warming oceans are going to drown the great coral reef ecosystems? No problem -- every coral reef in the world was drowned by the great meltwater pulses at the end of the last Ice Age. They reconstituted themselves after a few thousand years. They can do that again. So the ice-free north pole is going to kill the polar bears? Yeah, probably, most of them -- but there've been ice-free north poles many previous times in the Polar bears' 2.5-million-year evolutionary history. Evidence suggests that during the warmest part of interglacial periods, they hybridise with Grizzlies and then re-speciate when the climate cools down again. They can cope -- and even if they can't, losing an apex predator isn't the worst thing that can happen to an ecosystem. Losing the base of the food chain, however, is. My point is not that climate change isn't real, or that humans aren't causing it, or that the disruptions it will cause won't be horrible and tragic and painful and expensive -- my point is that both ecosystems and civilisations are complex adaptive systems which have already proven themselves to be reasonably robust against exactly these sort of disruptions. Ocean acidification is different than sea level rise and global warming, however. With ocean acidification, we're making an excursion unlike anything the planet has seen in 300 million years. There's simply no precedent that allows us to say "yeah, it's gonna hurt, but the world has already shown that it can cope with this kind of thing". It hasn't. As far as we know, this level of OA could produce a full trophic collapse -- and that isn't something that even I can't be cavalier about, as it would certainly be a civilisation-limiting (and possibly complex-life-limiting) event. Until we know for certain that the impacts of OA will be less severe than this, we should be doing everything we can to stop and reverse it.

OopsCriticality 11y ago
I've wondered if part of the problem is that pH is logarithmic, so a drop of, say, 0.2 pH doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
- jaekwon 11y ago
  I haven't read the article. For the lazy, what sort of level of pH changes are we talking about? Would if affect me if I go swimming in the ocean?
  - OopsCriticality 11y ago
    Not to be critical, but it is in the 1st paragraph: 8.2 (pre-industrial) to 7.8 (projected, 2100).
  - japhyr 11y ago
    Would if affect me if I go swimming in the ocean? No, because you're a large adult organism. But if you were a tiny crustacean, you wouldn't be able to grow a shell. This affects tiny crustaceans, but also the young of large species such as king crabs.
    - prawn 11y ago
      The aquarium in Boston has a hands-on demo for kids about acidification impacting the ability of some creatures to grow their shell. Didn't see anyone else but my son and I trying it though. Hopefully the message gets through to more people, but I think too many people fail to see how it could impact them.
raverbashing 11y ago
I think we're going to learn something about evolution But I really expect that simple organisms (like, you know, plankton) will evolve to survive I don't think a small change in ph is as hard for evolution as dealing with the already high amount of salt in oceans The Zebra mussels are probably going to survive as well

fleitz 11y ago

Well, it turns out there's an extremely cheap solution to this that can sequester another 1/3rd of our carbon while making lots of plankton and restocking the oceans with fish. http://planetsave.com/2014/07/02/ocean-fertilization-dangerous-experiment-gone-right/ http://planetsave.com/2014/07/02/ocean-fertilization-dangero...

eastbayjake 11y ago
This is fascinating -- I wanted to ask if anyone knew of any geoengineering ideas to deal with rising ocean temperatures and acidity EDIT: The article mentions that "there are also concerns that trapping CO2 at the bottom of the ocean may increase ocean acidification" so I'm not sure if this particular approach is really a solution?
- acqq 11y ago
  And actually "its potential effectiveness in removing CO2 from the atmosphere remains unproven."
- pvaldes 11y ago
  Ocean fertilization is an idea discussed from oceanographers since the last twenty years at least.
nkoren 11y ago
According to the article, this might be an extremely cheap way of making the problem worse: > There are also concerns that trapping CO2 at the bottom of the ocean may increase ocean acidification ...However it certainly is interesting enough to warrant more research!
ScottBurson 11y ago
I'm really glad to see this. I don't know for sure that iron fertilization will turn out to be a good idea, but the opposition to experimenting with it baffles me. It's like people think that we can choose whether or not to engage in geoengineering. No, we can't: we're already doing it (as indeed the article points out). If we can find new interventions that counteract the effects of our existing interventions, that would be a wonderful thing. I think we should be experimenting with both iron fertilization (to sequester carbon and combat ocean acidification) and sulfur aerosols (for cooling). Both of these mimic natural events such as volcanic eruptions; they're not unprecedented in nature.

_red 11y ago

"Acidification" is a purposely alarmist term. (ie. oceans are turning to acid). The pH is slightly moving towards neutral from an alkaline base. I wonder if the continued use of this term by the "climate change industry" is to relay accurate scientific information or just to help increase their funding?

milesskorpen 11y ago
> The pH is slightly moving towards neutral from an alkaline base. ... which would be disastrous for a huge chunk of the ocean's ecosystem. "Acidification" seems entirely appropriate; what's the alternative you'd propose?
- Florin_Andrei 11y ago
  > what's the alternative you'd propose? something something Free Market something something
OopsCriticality 11y ago
Acidification is not "purposely alarmist", it is the accurate scientific description of what is happening. pH is logarithmic, so "slightly moving towards neutral" is actually a huge relative change. If anything, the "climate change industry" as you put it are doing a piss poor job of attracting attention to something very scary.
guscost 11y ago
"...the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary." - H. L. Mencken
moultano 11y ago
Go read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event I don't think any amount of alarm could possibly be enough.
- 11y ago

jefurii 11y ago

> “If you went to Boston Harbor and pulled up a cup of water and looked under a microscope, you’d see very different species later on,” Dutkiewicz says. “By 2100, you’d see ones that were living maybe closer to North Carolina now, up near Boston.” I hope marine communities are that adaptable. What if the species in North Carolina aren't able to move up to Boston Harbor and they all just die?

storf45 11y ago

Does anyone know if there is additional information on the precision of the measurements? Is the ocean ph going from 8.16 (8.2) to 8.14 (8.1) in this article or is it more dramatic than that? I wasn't able to access the full study because of the pay-wall.

prawn 11y ago

To the few commenters on this page offering a somewhat contrarian view, what's your beef? Is it reactive skepticism, or being contrarian for the sake of it, or having a vested interest in the status quo?

contingencies 11y ago

Coming as it does on the heels of yesterday's sea level warning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927099 this makes me wonder what it takes to take a large chunk of water, maintain a traditional pH, cleanliness and temperature, and grow stuff (fish, algae, seaweed). It seems this is going to be an area with increasing demand, even just betting on the growing population. Anyone interested in doing an aquaculture startup? I have had some ideas in the area (I think fundamentally different to others) already.