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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
by 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 agoI'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 agoI 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 agoNot to be critical, but it is in the 1st paragraph: 8.2 (pre-industrial) to 7.8 (projected, 2100).
- japhyr 11y agoWould 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 agoThe 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 agoI 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
- japhyr 11y agoBut I really expect that simple organisms (like, you know, plankton) will evolve to survive What makes you confident of that?
- pvaldes 11y agooh, life is badass and is doing this all the time. The opposite (nobody evolves to survive) will be very improbable. In a similar past scenery all known species of Ammonitoidea vanished and dissapear, but some similar cephalopods just lose the external shell, growth a skin over the shell somehow or put the remains of the shell inside the body and its descendants are doing fine as octopus, squids and cuttlefish. It will be a disaster for the humans that need clams, crustaceans and sea ursins to feed this families, and hundreds of marine species will not survive of course, but for a few species this will be a real blessing.
- moultano 11y agoThis has happened several times in earth's history, and caused many extinction events. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event (Ironically most of our fossil fuel is the result of extinction events caused by the buildup of CO2.)
- x5n1 11y agoSo you're saying we'll have another oil boom in a few million years? Great. Let me get ready by buying stock.
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- j_baker 11y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but it would seem like Ocean Acidification would be less prone to "Climate Commitment" than regular climate change. Meaning, if we just stopped emitting greenhouse gases, OA would stop increasing. The rest of Climate change would still keep continuing for a few decades.
- thinkcontext 11y agoI don't think this is known. If all CO2 emissions stop and atmospheric levels are 450ppm but the ocean and atmosphere are at equilibrium at 350ppm then OA will continue to increase. Further, once equilibrium is achieved it is unknown how long it would take for OA to reverse.
- crazydoggers 11y agoThere actually has been precedent for ocean acidification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm... But I don't think we should only be scared by things that cause "full trophic collapse". We're looking at unprecedented environmental changes (in terms of speed) at about the same time the world population will be hitting 11 Billion people. Foreseeing how all the variables will interact is almost impossible. Yes, the earth and life will go on. But it very well could be a horrible and scary place to live for us humans in the interim.
- x5n1 11y agoThat's what a lot of these people don't get. At no time in our past has the Earth had to support more than a few hundred million humans. So exactly, welcome to the climate change holocaust. Except it won't be 6 million, more likely a billion. And the wars and the violence to go with it.
- happyscrappy 11y agoClimate zealots are ridiculous on both sides. Comments like yours, while popular, are the opposite of science. Do you want to get people on board to reduce pollution, then stop insulting their intelligence with juvenile nonsense. Listen to the scientists.
- x5n1 11y agoHow is your comment any more mature. It borders on the line of religious zealotry with the status quo who don't know what they are doing. It's like yes we produce a bunch of garbage. Sure a lot of people might die, but at least we are professional about it. Yeah people like you take this stuff very seriously. You guys are all grown up. The elite, just like all elite, are the blind leading the blind. They don't know what the fuck they are doing, but are sure damn well sure in themselves. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/nov/03/global-warming-climate-refugees http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/nov/03/global-wa... 11 billion * .10 = 1.1 billion Right now: 11.3% of the world’s population is hungry. That’s roughly 805 million people who go undernourished on a daily basis, consuming less than the recommended 2,100 calories a day. That number will increase.
- tstactplsignore 11y agoA couple of points. >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. NOAA says it takes 10k years at least [0], which is quite a long time, and that's assuming optimal conditions. Reefs are immediately threatened by ocean acidification, warming waters, biodiversity loss, and physical ecosystem destruction. In current conditions, all coral reefs will be in danger of extinction by 2050; 10% of world coral reefs have already died off. (and the damage due to bleaching and biodiversity loss at those which haven't yet is obvious and apparent to every person who has frequented them in the last 30 years) I don't think anyone is particularly worried about humans ending the long time viability of life on Earth; we can't wipe out everything, and the Earth's ecosystems will recover over a period of time proportional to the size of the human caused disaster. It's sort of alarming that you present such a straw man argument, as if you're reading a science fiction novel, where it's all going to be okay because in a few million years, things will be back on track again, and you seem to be completely unconcerned with the immediate impacts and benefits of these ecosystems, completely detached from the reality at hand. We're talking about real ecosystems and their incalculable impact (there are estimates of the economic importance of reefs, but it is the scientific and social impacts which are incalculable) on real people, alive today, living right now, that should be alarming and upsetting enough without considering long-term geological scale issues. A second point. >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. This statement is actually most inaccurate when it comes to the current rate of climate change. There are multiple studies, and levels of evidence, at multiple geological time scales, which show that the current and predicted rates of warming are unprecedented throughout geological time. The current rate of warming is faster now than at any time in the last 11,000 years [1], and it may occur faster than any climate change which has occurred in the last 65 million years [2], current rates of warming are substantially faster than that at the end of an ice age [3], and CO2 levels are currently higher than at any point within the last 800,000 years [4]. It is important to understand that these issues will have real impacts on real people in the immediate future, and being optimistic on the scale of geological time is absurdly detached from a day to day reality. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and ocean acidification will have serious impact on the immediate time scale, and are largely unprecedented in the geological time scale. [0] http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/corals/coral04_reefs.html http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/corals/coral04_r... [1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/13/global_warming_new_study_shows_warming_is_faster_than_it_has_been_in_11.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/13/global_w... [2] http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/august/climate-change-speed-080113.html http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/august/climate-change-spe... [3] http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/pd/climate/factsheets/iscurrent.pdf http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/pd/climate/factsheets... [4] http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/04/09/3424704/carbon-dioxide-highest-level/ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/04/09/3424704/carbon-d...
- specialist 11y agoYup. Combining ocean acidification, thawing tundras, and burning forests, my hunch is the climate change has already entered a positive feedback loop. So even if we stopped anthropocentric CO2 emissions altogether, things will continue to worsen. (I just learned about ocean methane clathrate deposits. So I may have been too optimistic.) We'll need to sequester carbon at industrial scale to save our civilization. And figure out how to stop the non-human sources.
- spacemanmatt 11y agoWe are no small part of that positive feedback loop, either.