ocean acidification

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans

by Mark Lynas  · 3 Oct 2011  · 369pp  · 98,776 words

BOUNDARY 1: Biodiversity BOUNDARY 2: Climate Change BOUNDARY 3: Nitrogen BOUNDARY 4: Land Use BOUNDARY 5: Freshwater BOUNDARY 6: Toxics BOUNDARY 7: Aerosols BOUNDARY 8: Ocean Acidification BOUNDARY 9: Ozone Layer EPILOGUE: Managing the Planet NOTES INDEX ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is an unusual beast, because it is conceptually and scientifically based on

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to human activities in these areas. Some, like climate change and biodiversity loss, were familiar and obvious contenders for top-level concern. Others, like ocean acidification and the accumulation of environmental toxics, were newer and less well-understood additions to the stable. During hours of debate, and with much scribbling of

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rise, and temperatures begin to race out of control, then the biodiversity boundary, the ozone boundary, the freshwater boundary, the land use boundary, and ocean acidification boundaries cannot be met either, and the remaining planetary boundaries are also called into question. The climate boundary is humanity’s first and biggest test

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the party can go on forever has led him to stray into very unscientific stances on issues covered in this book like climate change and ocean acidification. Why not just admit candidly that while the human advance has been amazing and hugely beneficial, it has also had serious environmental impacts? As

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Of course, curing the disease is always better than merely treating the symptoms. But doing both may be the best option of all. BOUNDARY EIGHT OCEAN ACIDIFICATION I have already said a lot about human interference with the carbon cycle, because of the supreme importance of the climate change planetary boundary. But

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sea urchins, use to build their shells or skeletons.3 This “other CO2 problem” is now considered so crucial that one group of experts suggests ocean acidification “could represent an equal (or perhaps even greater) threat to the biology of our planet” than climate change alone.4 What the future holds

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geological past. My conclusion is straightforward. Even if there were no climate change, we would still have to get rid of CO2—urgently—because ocean acidification presents a serious threat to the integrity of the marine biosphere. INDUSTRIAL OCEANS At the dawn of the Anthropocene, at the end of the eighteenth

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reefs, probably the world’s most important oceanic habitat, are already in decline almost everywhere because of global warming, overfishing, and other human impacts. But ocean acidification, unless rapidly addressed, will kill them completely. Reefs are entirely made of calcium carbonate, and that makes them extremely vulnerable to more acidic oceans. Past

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, snails, mussels, and hundreds of other ocean-dwelling animals and plants.19 This and other upwelling zones that are experiencing the earliest effects of ocean acidification also tend to support flourishing fisheries—from the Peru Current to Alaska’s billion-dollar pollock fishery. Once again, the planetary boundaries interact in a

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from their calcifying brethren, another planetary-scale visual change that might be detected from space. Scientific studies seem to confirm that coccolithophores are sensitive to ocean acidification: Those organisms exposed to high-CO2 conditions grow degraded or malformed shells and reduce their rate of calcium carbonate production.23 Similar effects have been

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other top predators. Accordingly, addressing this problem means understanding the interactions between at least four planetary boundaries: those on climate, nitrogen, biodiversity, and, of course, ocean acidification itself. REEF GAPS As I showed in the chapter on climate change, scientists have learned a lot about the future by looking at the past

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.34 Even spread over ten or twenty thousand years, that is an awful lot of carbon—and the ensuing extreme greenhouse effect and bout of ocean acidification are recorded in both carbon isotopes35 and a worldwide “calcification crisis” as calcium carbonate-forming plankton were wiped out. In their stead, the hot

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to one of the top three worst reef-gap events in the entire Phanerozoic (the last half-billion years). There is clear evidence of global ocean acidification, with calcifying corals extinguished and green algae proliferating.43 Indeed, the extinction of corals was close in magnitude to that of the much more

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the dinosaurs. So the geological record provides a clear and unambiguous warning that intervals of very high CO2 release and global warming can cause dramatic ocean acidification and disaster for coral reefs. But this is not always the case. A hundred million years ago, during the mid-Cretaceous, chalky plankton thrived

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century they could be reduced to “eroding geological structures with populations of surviving biota restricted to refuges.”49 Adhering to the proposed planetary boundary on ocean acidification is therefore critically important to the survival of the marine biosphere. The planetary boundaries expert group accordingly makes a very specific numerical recommendation, setting a

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hard to judge, but it may be low enough to be a commercially competitive form of carbon sequestration, as well as a mitigation strategy for ocean acidification. At this stage, the urgent need is for further study and trials on a small scale to test impacts on the marine environment. Another

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the atmosphere above the climate change planetary boundary of 350 ppm. No one is suggesting immediate deployment, but carbon-negative solutions that also directly address ocean acidification at a chemical level are surely worthy of additional research and development in order to properly assess their real-world feasibility. Overall, there needs to

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be a step-change in the level of attention given to the issue of ocean acidification. So far, only academic conferences have addressed the challenge properly—public knowledge and concern remain extremely low. But, urgent as the situation is, scientists,

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issue on its website, while luminaries who have made a career out of denying the reality of global warming are now beginning to converge on ocean acidification as being, in the words of the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels, “the next hysteria.”55 In scientific terms, the criticisms leveled by Ridley

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and other ocean acidification skeptics are no more valid than the reasons they have already given for not believing in global warming. In a November 2010 op-ed for

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marine scientists, before cherry-picking (and misinterpreting) a small number of scientific studies that appear to contradict the consensus position on the biological impacts of ocean acidification and generalizing on this basis that the whole thing is exaggerated. He ties this to a number of mistakes, writing, for example: “Environmentalists like

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” (always a convenient straw man) for allegedly not reporting the truth. “Before I started looking into this, I assumed the evidence for damage from ocean acidification must be strong because that is what the media kept saying. I am amazed by what I have found,” he concludes. This is strong stuff

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held. One could argue that Ridley’s stance is actually a reputational risk for him, because in denying what scientists call the “irrefutable chemistry” of ocean acidification (and adopting a similar position on climate change) he undermines his credibility as a popular science writer on other issues. This is curious, because

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the political polarization that has overtaken the societal debate about carbon emissions in particular and the environment in general over the last few years. While ocean acidification does not yet register high enough in public awareness terms to be seriously at issue, opinion polls show very clearly that for climate change

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popular credence and political force it is surely the Green movement that must be its most passionate and determined champion. Climate change (and, by extension, ocean acidification) is politically toxic to the libertarian right precisely because it forces humanity to confront the necessity of respecting planetary limits—in this case regarding the

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three of the nine planetary boundaries—biodiversity, climate, and nitrogen—and has successfully navigated away from a breach of one, the ozone layer. Boundaries on ocean acidification, land use, and water use are still avoidable. I am confident that we can respect them, and move back into the safety zone with

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“20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 64, 2, 14–18. 48. Crutzen, cited above. 8: OCEAN ACIDIFICATION 1. S. C. Doney et al., 2009: “Ocean Acidification: A Critical Emerging Problem for the Ocean Sciences,” Oceanography, 22,4, 16–25. 2. U. Riebesell et al., 2009: “Sensitivities of

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Acidified’ Water onto the Continental Shelf,” Science, 320, 1490–2. 9. M. Yamamoto-Kawai et al., 2009: “Aragonite Undersaturation in the Arctic Ocean: Effects of Ocean Acidification and Sea Ice Melt,” Science, 326, 5956, 1098–1100. 10. G. De’ath et al., 2009: “Declining Coral Calcification on the Great Barrier Reef,” Science

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Porites lutea from the Andaman Sea, South Thailand Between 1984 and 2005,” Coral Reefs, 28, 2, 519–28. 13. K. Anthony et al., 2008: “Ocean Acidification Causes Bleaching and Productivity Loss in Coral Reef Builders,” PNAS, 105, 45, 17442–6. 14. J. Hall-Spencer et al., 2008: “Volcanic Carbon Dioxide Vents

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Show Ecosystem Effects of Ocean Acidification,” Nature, 454, 96–9. 15. D. Manzello et al., 2008: “Poorly Cemented Coral Reefs of the Eastern Tropical Pacific: Possible Insights into Reef Development

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May Start Dissolving When Atmospheric CO2 Doubles,” Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L05606. 18. Yamamoto-Kawai et al., cited above. 19. C. Hauri et al., 2009: “Ocean Acidification in the California Current System,” Oceanography, 22, 4, 60–71. 20. P. Brewer and E. Peltzer, 2009: “Oceans: Limits to Marine Life,” Science, 324,

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l, 2009: “Reduced Calcification in Modern Southern Ocean Planktonic Foraminifera,” Nature Geoscience, 2, 276–80. 22. W. Balch, and P. Utgoff, 2009: “Potential Interactions Among Ocean Acidification, Coccolithophores, and the Optical Properties of Seawater,” Oceanography, 22, 4, 146–59. 23. See, for example, two reports spanning a decade—U. Riebesell et al

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., 2010: “Effects of Long-Term High CO2 Exposure on Two Species of Coccolithophores,” Biogeosciences, 7, 1109–16. 24. J. Orr, et al., 2005: “Anthropogenic Ocean Acidification over the Twenty-first Century and Its Impact on Calcifying Organisms,” Nature, 437, 681–6. 25. S. Kawaguchi et al., 2010: “Will Krill Fare Well

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the Early Life Stages of the Blue Mussel (Mytilus edulis),” Biogeosciences Discussions, 7, 2927–47. 29. J. Kleypas and K. Yates, 2009: “Coral Reefs and Ocean Acidification,” Oceanography, 22, 4, 108–17. 30. D. Hutchins et al., 2009: “Nutrient Cycles and Marine Microbes in a CO2-enriched Ocean,” Oceanography, 22, 4,

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J. Jackson, 2008: “Ecological Extinction and Evolution in the Brave New Ocean,” PNAS, 105, Supplement 1, 11458–65. 32. J. Veron, 2008: “Mass Extinctions and Ocean Acidification: Biological Constraints on Geological Dilemmas,” Coral Reefs, 27, 3, 459–72. 33. A. Marzoli et al., 2004: “Synchrony of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province and

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the Triassic–Jurassic Boundary Climatic and Biotic Crisis,” Geology, 32, 11, 973–6. 34. M. Hautmann et al., 2008: “Catastrophic Ocean Acidification at the Triassic-Jurassic Boundary,” Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie—Abhandlungen, 249, 1, 119–27. 35. J. Whiteside et al., 2010: “Compound-Specific Carbon

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“End-Triassic Calcification Crisis and Blooms of Organic-Walled ‘Disaster Species,’” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 244, 1–4, 126–41. 37. L. Kump et al., 2009: “Ocean Acidification in Deep Time,” Oceanography, 22, 4, 94–107. 38. M. Medina et al., 2006: “Naked Corals: Skeleton Loss in Scleractinia,” PNAS, 103, 24, 9096–9100

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. 39. Kump et al., cited above. 40. R. Kerr, 2010: “Ocean Acidification Unprecedented, Unsettling,” Science, 328, 5985, 1500–1. 41. Pelejero et al., cited above. 42. See http://trillionthtonne.org for the latest. 43. W. Kiessling, and

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C. Simpson, 2010: “On the Potential for Ocean Acidification to Be a General Cause of Ancient Reef Crises,” Global Change Biology, 17, 1, 56–67. 44. Pelejero et al., cited above. 45. A. Ridgwell

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: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Ecology and Society, 14, 2, 32. 51. Figures from Table 1, J. Guinotte and V. Fabry, 2008: “Ocean Acidification and Its Potential Effects on Marine Ecosystems,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1134, Issue “The Year in Ecology and Conservation Biology 2008

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,” 320–42. 52. R. Schuiling and O. Tickell, 2010: “Olivine Against Climate Change and Ocean Acidification,” unpublished manuscript communicated by the authors. 53. For a detailed description see http://www.cquestrate.com/the-idea/detailed-description-of-the-idea. 54. M

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M. Ridley, 2010: “Who’s Afraid of Acid in the Ocean? Not Me,” The Times, November 4, 2010. 57. See “Response on Behalf of UK Ocean Acidification Research Programme” to Matt Ridley article, at http://www.oceanacidification.org.uk/PDF/Briefing note on Ridley article - 19 Nov.pdf. 58. http://wonkroom.thinkprogress

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(Lawson) Andes Andreae, Meinrat Antarctic Anthropocene aquaculture aragonite Aral Sea Archer, David Arctic: plastic waste in; habitat destruction in thaw of; tundra; toxics accumulate in; ocean acidification and Argentina Argonne National Laboratory Asia: tsunami, 2004; Homo neanderthalensis; animal extinction and; poverty in wind power in; nitrate pollution in; genetically engineered crops in

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in; land use in; wind power in Northern permafrost zone carbon store Norway no-till agriculture nuclear power; pollution/dangers of Nuon Renewables Obama, Barack ocean acidification; waste in; evolution of; animals depleted; boundary; life in acidic oceans; reef gaps; oceans of the future; carbon cycle and; ocean pH; sea creatures

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Rozzi, Fernando RSPB Rudd, Kevin runoff Sahara Sahel, Africa Sarkozy, Nicolas Saudi Arabia Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim Science sea: depletion of animals in; levels see also ocean acidification Serreze, Mark Severn Estuary tidal barrage ship-emitted pollutants Siberia Sierra Club Silent Spring (Carson) Sites of Special Scientific Interest Six Degrees (Lynas) Sky, Jasper

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

by Elizabeth Kolbert  · 11 Feb 2014  · 308pp  · 94,447 words

hundred thousand. By the time it was over, something like ninety percent of all species on earth had been eliminated. Even intense global warming and ocean acidification seem inadequate to explain losses on such a staggering scale, and so additional mechanisms are still being sought. One hypothesis has it that the heating

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point. Climate change—itself a driver of extinction—will also leave behind geologic traces, as will nuclear fallout and river diversion and monoculture farming and ocean acidification. For all of these reasons, Zalasiewicz believes that we have entered a new epoch, which has no analog in earth’s history. “Geologically,” he has

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, there has been an explosion of interest in acidification and its effects. International research projects with names like BIOACID (Biological Impacts of Ocean Acidification) and EPOCA (the European Project on Ocean Acidification) have been funded, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of experiments have been undertaken. These experiments have been conducted on board ships, in laboratories

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coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi. Ulf Riebesell is a biological oceanographer at the GEOMAR-Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, who has directed several major ocean acidification studies, off the coasts of Norway, Finland, and Svalbard. Riebesell has found that the groups that tend to fare best in acidified water are plankton

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tolerant organisms will become more abundant, but overall diversity will be lost. This is what has happened in all these times of major mass extinction.” Ocean acidification is sometimes referred to as global warming’s “equally evil twin.” The irony is intentional and fair enough as far as it goes, which may

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enough. No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions in the record, and yet changes in ocean chemistry seem to be a pretty good predictor. Ocean acidification played a role in at least two of the Big Five extinctions (the end-Permian and the end-Triassic) and quite possibly it was a

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major factor in a third (the end-Cretaceous). There’s strong evidence for ocean acidification during an extinction event known as the Toarcian Turnover, which occurred 183 million years ago, in the early Jurassic, and similar evidence at the end

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of the Paleocene, 55 million years ago, when several forms of marine life suffered a major crisis. “Oh, ocean acidification,” Zalasiewicz had told me at Dob’s Linn. “That’s the big nasty one that’s coming down.” * * * WHY is

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ocean acidification so dangerous? The question is tough to answer only because the list of reasons is so long. Depending on how tightly organisms are able to

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’t combine. At the site of calcification, organisms must therefore alter the chemistry of the water to, in effect, impose a chemistry of their own. Ocean acidification increases the cost of calcification by reducing the number of carbonate ions available to begin with. To extend the construction metaphor, imagine trying to build

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-Doherty Earth Observatory, recently reviewed the evidence for changing CO2 levels in the geologic past and concluded that, although there are several severe episodes of ocean acidification in the record, “no past event perfectly parallels” what is happening right now, owing to “the unprecedented rapidity of CO2 release currently taking place.” It

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was going to watch the annual coral spawning and observe what had been described to me in various Skype conversations as a seminal experiment on ocean acidification. Researchers from the University of Queensland were building an elaborate Plexiglas mesocosm that was going to allow them to manipulate CO2 levels on a patch

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over soldering irons in the lab. As I was trying to figure out what to do next, I heard about another experiment on corals and ocean acidification that was under way at One Tree, which, by the scale of the Great Barrier Reef, lies just around the corner. Three days later—there

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team at One Tree was an atmospheric scientist named Ken Caldeira. Caldeira, who’s based at Stanford, is often credited with having coined the term “ocean acidification.” He became interested in the subject in the late nineteen-nineties when he was hired to do a project for the Department of Energy. The

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effects of ordinary atmospheric release were so startling. Caldeira published the first part of his paper under the subheading “The Coming Centuries May See More Ocean Acidification Than the Past 300 Million Years.” “Under business as usual, by mid-century things are looking rather grim,” he told me a few hours after

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as an enterprise must be particularly vulnerable to environmental change—yet another paradox, since reef building is also one of the oldest enterprises on earth. Ocean acidification is, of course, not the only threat reefs are under. Indeed, in some parts of the world, reefs probably will not last long enough for

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ocean acidification to finish them off. The roster of perils includes, but is not limited to: overfishing, which promotes the growth of algae that compete with corals;

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the Caribbean has in recent decades declined by close to eighty percent. Finally and perhaps most significant on the list of hazards is climate change—ocean acidification’s equally evil twin. Tropical reefs need warmth, but when water temperatures rise too high, trouble ensues. The reasons for this have to do with

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stresses that we are putting on species,” Silman told me. “In other kinds of human disturbances there were always spatial refuges. Climate affects everything.” Like ocean acidification, it is a global phenomenon, or, to borrow from Cuvier, a “revolution on the surface of the earth.” * * * THAT afternoon, we emerged onto a dirt

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somewhat beyond the scope of the BDFFP, there’s a dark synergy between fragmentation and global warming, just as there is between global warming and ocean acidification, and between global warming and invasive species, and between invasive species and fragmentation. A species that needs to migrate to keep up with rising temperatures

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to Dan Condon and Ian Millar for a memorable (if wet) expedition, and to Paul Crutzen for explaining to me his idea of the Anthropocene. Ocean acidification is a daunting topic. I never would have been able to write about it without the help of Chris Langdon, Richard Feely, Chris Sabine, Joanie

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AROUND US the tally they came up with was very different: Jason M. Hall-Spencer et al., “Volcanic Carbon Dioxide Vents Show Ecosystem Effects of Ocean Acidification,” Nature 454 (2008): 96–99. Details from supplementary tables. in one mesocosm experiment: Ulf Reibesell, personal communication, Aug. 6, 2012. There’s strong evidence: Wolfgang

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Kiessling and Carl Simpson, “On the Potential for Ocean Acidification to Be a General Cause of Ancient Reef Crises,” Global Change Biology 17 (2011): 56–67. It’s been estimated that calcification evolved: Andrew H

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in Mineralogy and Geochemistry 54 (2003): 329–56. three-quarters of the missing: Hall-Spencer et al., “Volcanic Carbon Dioxide Vents Show Ecosystem Effects of Ocean Acidification,” Nature 454 (2008): 96–99. This comes to a stunning: For up-to-date figures on atmospheric emissions and ocean uptake of carbon dioxide, thanks

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Chu, “Timeline of a Mass Extinction,” MIT News Office, published online Nov. 18, 2011. “It is the rate”: Lee Kump, Timothy Bralower, and Andy Ridgwell, “Ocean Acidification in Deep Time,” Oceanography 22 (2009): 105. CHAPTER VII: DROPPING ACID “a wall of Coral Rock”: Quoted in James Bowen and Margarita Bowen, The Great

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of Coral Reefs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 278. “rapidly eroding rubble banks”: Ove Hoegh-Guldberg et al., “Coral Reefs under Rapid Climate Change and Ocean Acidification,” Science 318 (2007): 1737–42. Caldeira published the first part of his paper: Ken Caldeira and Michael E. Wickett, “Anthropogenic Carbon and Ocean pH,” Nature

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Great Auk. New York: Abrams, 1999. Gaskell, Jeremy. Who Killed the Great Auk? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gattuso, Jean-Pierre, and Lina Hansson, eds. Ocean Acidification. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Viking, 1987. Glen, William, ed. The Mass-Extinction Debates: How Science

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. Wignall. Mass Extinctions and Their Aftermath. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hall-Spencer, Jason M., et al. “Volcanic Carbon Dioxide Vents Show Ecosystem Effects of Ocean Acidification.” Nature 454 (2008): 96–99. Hamilton, Andrew J., et al. “Quantifying Uncertainty in Estimation of Tropical Arthropod Species Richness.” American Naturalist 176 (2010): 90–95

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Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis.” Science 317 (2007): 1360–66. Hoegh-Guldberg, Ove, et al. “Coral Reefs under Rapid Climate Change and Ocean Acidification.” Science 318 (2007): 1737–42. Hoffmann, Michael, et al. “The Impact of Conservation on the Status of the World’s Vertebrates.” Science 330 (2010): 1503

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. Johnson, Chris. Australia’s Mammal Extinctions: A 50,000 Year History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Kiessling, Wolfgang, and Carl Simpson. “On the Potential for Ocean Acidification to Be a General Cause of Ancient Reef Crises.” Global Change Biology 17 (2011): 56–67. Knoll, A. H. “Biomineralization and Evolutionary History.” Reviews in

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Press, 1997. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Kump, Lee, Timothy Bralower, and Andy Ridgwell. “Ocean Acidification in Deep Time.” Oceanography 22 (2009): 94–107. Kump, Lee R., Alexander Pavlov, and Michael A. Arthur. “Massive Release of Hydrogen Sulfide to the Surface

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land bridge Big Bone Lick Big Five extinctions. See also specific periods binomial nomenclature BIOACID (Biological Impacts of Ocean Acidification) biodiversity climate change and coral reefs and expansion and contraction of fragmentation and local ocean acidification and rainforests and term introduced time and tropical vs. cold climates and Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project

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, Alan burdock butterflies blue morpho Caecilians calcification Caldeira, Ken California Cambrian period Camelops Canada captive breeding carbon dioxide (CO2) deep-sea injection ice ages and ocean acidification and past vs. present levels Carboniferous period cardinals Caribbean Carson, Rachel Cartier, Jacques Cartwright, George Castello Arogonese sea vents catastrophism cats, large saber-toothed (Smilodon

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emissions and cold-loving species and coral reefs and earlier extinctions and future of geologic traces of current invasive species and megafauna and Neanderthals and ocean acidification and rainforest and rate of, and species-area relationship and wildlife reserves clownfish coccolithophore (Emiliania huxleyi) cock-of-the-rocks, Andean Cohn-Haft, Mario Columbian

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Exchange Condon, Dan condors, California conodonts Conservation Biology Conservation International continental drift Cook, James coralline algae coral reefs bleaching and Darwin and marine life and ocean acidification and spawning and corals Acropora millepora elkhorn (Acropora palmata) rugose staghorn (Acropora cervicornis) tabulate correlation of parts crane, whooping Cretaceous period extinctions at end of

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and extinct in wild great apes as loss of rainforests and Endangered Species Act (1974) enemy release Enewetak atoll Eocene epoch EPOCA (European Project on Ocean Acidification) Erwin, Terry Eschscholtz, Johann Friedrich von Essay on Man (Pope) evolution abrupt change in rules and humans and Neanderthals and tropics and evolutionary clock extinction

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Environmental Conservation New York Times New Zealand nitrogen Noah’s Ark mollusk (Arca noae) noddies, black Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson) nuclear winter ocean acidification coral reefs and marine life and rate of Oceanography oceans. See also sea level; sea temperature atmosphere and dispersal of species and sulfate-reducing bacteria

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peccaries penguins peppershrike, rufous-browed Permian period extinction at end of Phillips, John Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B photosynthesis pH scale. See also ocean acidification picoplankton pigeon, plumbeous piha, screaming plankton plantains, broadleaf (Plantago major) plants global warming and invasive K-T extinctions and Ordovician plate tectonics Pleistocene epoch extinctions

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neutral; anything above that is basic and below it acidic. Seawater is naturally basic, so as the pH falls the process usually referred to as ocean acidification could, less catchily, be called a decline in ocean alkalinity. *It’s important to note that z is always less than 1—usually somewhere between

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians

by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman  · 21 Mar 2017  · 441pp  · 113,244 words

of the Titanic wreckage each independently contacted the Seasteading Institute and presented us with the same solution. Climate change, world hunger, peak oil, freshwater depletion, ocean acidification, and resource wars are not separate problems, each to be solved one at a time. They are all symptoms of a bigger problem. When you

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fish tomorrow, it would be too late. The seas aren’t just empty. They are sick. Human activity is turning our oceans to acid. “The ocean acidification is being driven by the added CO2 in the atmosphere,” Neil explains, “which is trying to find equilibrium with the CO2 in the oceans. If

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into glucose and into more complex carbohydrates. The only clear path that I can see going forward that’s going to mitigate the impacts of ocean acidification is we have to culture more plants in the ocean.” Sims says this the morning before he meets Ricardo Radulovich for the first time at

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. “We’re going to have to scale up macroalgae culture in a huge way if we’re going to have a significant mitigating effect on ocean acidification,” says Neil. “What’s the alternative? The alternative is mass extinction throughout the oceans, and massive economic disruption as ecosystems are crushed, and real challenges

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and atmosphere. Don’t worry, Neil hasn’t run out of acronyms: there’s IMAGEn—Integrated Marine Agronomy and Geo-Engineering—his plan to reduce ocean acidification, mitigate global warming, and meet humanity’s energy and food requirements, all at a profit, by establishing a symbiotic relationship with algae. “If we have

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, this inflection could be extrapolated continuously downward, season after season, year after year.” Sims helped create the Blue-on-Blue Initiative, a plan to reverse ocean acidification and global warming. Writing in his 2011 paper “The Blue-on-Blue Initiative”: The conventional wisdom that the open ocean is a virtual desert is

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years of data gathering, scientists were able to compare and contrast seventy-five different types of species-production systems to determine their environmental impacts on ocean acidification, climate change, energy demand, land-use demand, and other ecological factors. “They looked at aquaculture in the context of all the other animal protein on

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algae, which become fish? We pull all that carbon out in the form of fish. If we are correct, this is a way to reduce ocean acidification, feed the world, and potentially prevent future wars over food.” Pond scum know how to turn CO2 into pond scum. Fish know how to turn

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bigger risk. Lissa puts her hope in what she affectionately calls “ocean nuts,” adding that her husband is one. Lissa has her own hypothesis about ocean acidification. Carbonic acid in the water seems to be increasing much faster than CO2 in the atmosphere. Lissa doesn’t think the increasing CO2 input from

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the last century. “Most of the CO2 is in the surface three hundred feet. It’s not diffusing down fast enough. It may be that ocean acidification is not due to fossil fuel use only. This idea was first proposed by Charles Darwin’s grandson. When you look at those charts with

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seals and bottlenose whales dive deep, with sperm whales getting close to two miles. “Is it possible that the reason we are seeing such fast ocean acidification in the surface water is because we have fished out the vertical mixers? The people who said ‘Save the whales!’ were dead right, probably for

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learned that his or her solution intersected with many global problems. Lissa, trying to find an alternative fuel to prevent war; Neil, trying to reduce ocean acidification to save fish; and Ricardo, trying to find food to feed billions, were all led inexorably to the planetary carbon cycle rooted in the oceans

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industrial revolution, ocean acidity has increased 30 percent: NOAA’s PMEL Carbon Program: http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidification%3F and http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Ocean+Acidification. Since the industrial revolution, ocean acidity has increased 30 percent after holding steady for about 21 million years, www

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.ocean-acidification.net/About.html. “each square kilometer (about 0.4 square miles) will sequester 40 tons of carbon”: R. Radulovich, “Maricultura en Costa Rica,” Ambientico 179 (

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180,000 square kilometers could provide enough protein for the entire world population.” See also M. Y. Roleda and C. L. Hurd, “Seaweed Responses to Ocean Acidification. Ecological Studies,” Seaweed Biology (2012): 407–31. See also T. Flannery, “Seaweed Could Save the World’s Oceans from Becoming Too Acidic. Quarts, November 4

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/evidence. Corals and mollusks require a certain pH level in the surrounding water: Justin Ries et al., “Marine Calcifiers Exhibit Mixed Responses to CO2-Induced Ocean Acidification,” Geological Society of America (July 21, 2009). See also A. Ridgwell and D. N. Schmidt, “Past Constraints on the Vulnerability of Marine Calcifiers to Massive

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. 3 (2010): 196–200. See also Carl Zimmer, “An Ominous Warning on the Effects of Ocean Acidification,” Yale Environment 360, last modified February 15, 2010, http://e360.yale.edu/feature/an_ominous_warning_on_theeffects_of_ocean_acidification/2241. In 1980 10 percent of the world’s seafood came from fish farms: “A Milestone

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, 299 carbon cycle, 76, 88, 90–91, 122 carbon dioxide (CO2): and algae, 52, 75–76, 78, 84, 90–91 and Keeling Curve, 123 and ocean acidification, 49, 108 as pollution, 69 as product of photosynthesis, 73 reducing, 45, 146 carbonic acid, 76, 108–9 carbon sequestration, 120, 163 Cardwell, Donald, 288

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Fortune 500, 229 fossil fuels: annual use of, 52 compared to OTEC energy, 148, 151, 154, 155 diesel, 117 floating cities to replace, 144 and ocean acidification, 137 product of ancient photosynthesis, 74 replacement of with biofuels, 129–32 see also electricity; energy Foucault, Jean-Bernard-Léon, 228 Four Fish: The Future

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, 136, 271 Ober, Josiah, 281 obesity, 70 Ocean Conservancy, 128 Ocean Energy Council, 154–55 Ocean Energy Pioneer Award, 155 Ocean Farm Technologies, 119, 127 oceans: acidification of, 108–9, 133, 137 as bioeconomy, 76 contribution to economy, 17–20 repopulating with fish, 110 as solar collector, 144–49 see also aquaculture

Climate Change

by Joseph Romm  · 3 Dec 2015  · 358pp  · 93,969 words

global warming affect human productivity? Does carbon dioxide at exposure levels expected this century have any direct impacts on human health or cognition? What is ocean acidification and why does it matter to sea life? What is biodiversity and how will climate change impact it? How will climate change affect the agricultural

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greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change generally refers to all of the various long-term changes in our climate, including sea level rise, extreme weather, and ocean acidification. In 1896, a Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius, concluded that if we double atmospheric CO2 levels to 560 ppm (from preindustrial levels of 280), then surface

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be a major amplifying feedback because it would weaken the ability of the ocean to act as a carbon dioxide sink. At the same time, ocean acidification itself may speed up total warming this century as much as 0.9°F, according to a 2013 study. Researchers at Germany’s Max Planck

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Institute for Meteorology have found “Global warming amplified by reduced sulphur fluxes as a result of ocean acidification,” as they titled their Nature Climate Change study. Sulphur in the air comes mainly from the ocean and helps form clouds that keep the Earth

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, which help cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight.” However, as the ocean acidifies, seawater appears to generate less DMS. If DMS dropped globally because of ocean acidification, it would create an amplifying feedback that would boost global warming beyond what the climate models are predicting. How much extra warming could occur because

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of ocean acidification? The Max Planck Institute found that reductions in DMS would increase temperatures up to 0.48 K (0.9°F). They concluded, “Our results indicate

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that ocean acidification has the potential to exacerbate anthropogenic warming through a mechanism that is not considered at present in projections of future climate change.” Recall that the

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a small effect on cognition and productivity would be so huge that, as the LBNL authors conclude, “Confirmation of these findings is needed.” What is ocean acidification and why does it matter to sea life? One quarter of the carbon dioxide humans emit into the air gets absorbed in the oceans. The

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10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred. An April 2015 study in the journal Science, “Ocean Acidification and the Permo-Triassic Mass Extinction,” found that the cause of an earlier mass extinction was rapidly acidifying oceans driven by a major pulse of

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carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. Why does ocean acidification threaten marine life? As carbon dioxide is absorbed in water, it causes chemical reactions that reduce “saturation states of biologically important calcium carbonate minerals,” which

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biota.” How bad was this extinction? Besides killing over 90% of marine life, it wiped out some 70% of land-based animal and plant life. Ocean acidification has long been a great concern of the world’s climate scientists, in part because of its implications for global food production. In June 2009

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, some 70 Academies of Science issued a joint statement on ocean acidification. These groups of leading scientists from the major developed and developing countries warned “Ocean acidification is irreversible on timescales of at least tens of thousands of years” and “Marine food supplies are likely

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, “The science is clear: Unless we change the way we live, the Earth’s coral reefs will be utterly destroyed within our children’s lifetimes.” Ocean acidification and carbon pollution have already proven to be a major threat to the U.S. oyster industry, as was clear from the “The Great Oyster

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coming decades, the climate may well change too quickly for many if not most species to adapt. We have already seen that the rate of ocean acidification is considerably faster today than during previous mass ocean extinctions, and that carbon pollution does far more to oceans than just acidify them. The Royal

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intrusion from sea level rise threatens some of the richest agricultural deltas in the world, such as those of the Nile and the Ganges. Meanwhile, ocean acidification combined with ocean warming and overfishing may severely deplete the food available from the sea. On the demand side, the United Nations Food and Agricultural

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is the adverse effect of projected sea-level rise on agriculture in important low-lying delta areas.” Moreover, we have the threat to seafood of ocean acidification. Finally, we have Dust-Bowlification: The report also says drought-affected areas would increase from 15.4% of global cropland today, to around 44% by

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for hundreds of years. Whether most species could survive in that scenario of rapid warming is problematic. In its coverage of the April 2015 study “Ocean Acidification and the Permo-Triassic Mass Extinction,” led by Matthew Clarkson, the journal Nature reported, “The Great Dying might represent a worst-case scenario for the

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substitute for dramatic reductions in the emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases to mitigate the negative consequences of climate change, and concurrently to reduce ocean acidification.” That is the same conclusion as a 2009 assessment by the UK Royal Society, which found “Geoengineering methods are not a substitute for climate change

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-cooling strategy—or indeed any large-scale effort to manipulate sunlight. For one thing, they do nothing at all to slow the devastating impacts of ocean acidification discussed in Chapter Three (or any other impact that would be associated with rising carbon dioxide levels). One of the most widely discussed albedo modification

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. Further, albedo modification does nothing to reduce the build-up of atmospheric CO2, which is already changing the make-up of terrestrial ecosystems and causing ocean acidification and associated impacts on oceanic ecosystems. There is one final point on albedo modification. The Academy notes that “proposals to modify weather have tended to

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as corn ethanol and palm oil. However, if the world does not quickly get on the 2°C path, then temperature rise, sea-level rise, ocean acidification, and Dust-Bowlification combined make it unlikely there will be enough arable land and potable water to feed 10 billion people post-2050 and grow

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turn as much as one third of the arable land into Dust Bowls with near-permanent drought. At the same time, sea-level rise and ocean acidification will further constrain agriculture and food production. That is why scientists and governments have been working on a second-generation biofuel. So-called cellulosic ethanol

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than the United States, most countries do not have a lot of excess arable land, so even moderate Dust-Bowlification and sea-level rise and ocean acidification are likely to greatly limit their options for feeding their people. It seems likely the world will need yet another generation of biofuels, one that

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a Green Building.”; Personal communications with Bill Fisk, Pawel Wargocki, and Joseph Allen. 34. NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory Carbon Dioxide Program. What is ocean acidification? Retrieved from www.pmel.noaa.gov; World Meteorological Organization. (2014, September 9) WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin; The Interacademy Panel. (2009, June). IAP statement on

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ocean acidification; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Coral reefs—an important part of our future. Retrieved from www.noaa.gov/features/economic_0708/coralreefs.html; Veron, J.

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Data Center press release. (2014, October 7). Arctic sea ice continues low; Antarctic ice hits a new high. INDEX acidification ocean, 118–121 (see also ocean acidification) adaptation defined, 159 to human-caused climate change, 159–163 as resilience, 163 aerosol(s) sulfate in global warming variations, 23 agricultural sector climate change

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Hemisphere, 64–66 on human productivity effects of global warming, 107–108, 108f on Hurricane Sandy, 55 on “irreversible impacts” of climate change, 143 on ocean acidification, 119–120 on “permanently hotter summers,” 110, 111 on sea-level rise, 56, 253 on thawing permafrost, 82 on tornadoes, 68 national security climate change

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Obama, B., Pres., 160, 178, 180, 184 ocean(s) heat content of, 3, 7, 8f heating of by humans, 6–7 “sink efficiency” of, 89 ocean acidification, 17–18, 118–121 oyster industry effects of, 120 sea life’s effects of, 118–121 significance of, 118–121 warming related to, 91–92

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droughts, 98, 100 health-related, 103–107 human productivity–related, 107–112, 108f, 110f, 112f “irreversible impacts,” 140–145 national security–related, 128–131, 130f ocean acidification, 118–121 sea-level rise, 92–95 sources of uncertainty related to, 75–78 superstorms, 96–98 thawing permafrost in speeding up, 80–84 uncertainty

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global warming affect human productivity? Does carbon dioxide at exposure levels expected this century have any direct impacts on human health or cognition? What is ocean acidification and why does it matter to sea life? What is biodiversity and how will climate change impact it? How will climate change affect the agricultural

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

by Mark Lynas  · 1 Apr 2008  · 364pp  · 101,193 words

higher species from mackerel to humpbacked whales ultimately depend on them. Yet coccolithophores have a calcium carbonate structure, and this makes them especially vulnerable to ocean acidification. When scientists simulated the oceans of the future by pumping artificially high levels of dissolved CO2 into sections of a Norwegian fjord, they watched in

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: ‘Global temperature change’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103, 39, 14288-93 p. 54 reduce the alkalinity: Orr, J., et al., 2005: Anthropogenic ocean acidification over the twenty-first century and its impact on calcifying organisms', Nature, 437, 681-6 p. 54 major report: The Royal Society, 2005

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: Ocean acidification due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, Policy Document 12/05 p. 54 toxic: Orr, J., et al., 2005: ‘Anthropogenic ocean acidification over the twenty-first century and its impact on calcifying organisms’, Nature, 437, 681-6 p

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, 230, 233, 249-50 and climate sensitivity 248-9 emissions 78, 131, 204, 234-6, 246-7 fertilising effect of 174 from fires 197, 203 ocean acidification 53-6 plant emissions 60 volcanic outgassing 232, 233, 235 Caribbean 38, 113 Carboniferous period 234 Carnegie Institution 54 cars 172, 271, 272, 276 Carson

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Great Lakes 9 Great Plains 4, 5, 7, 155 Great Depression 210 Greece 177 greenhouse gases xix-xx, 110, 176, 178-9, 188, 236, 247 ocean acidification 53-4 see also carbon dioxide emissions methane Greenland 6, 10, 13, 67-70, 76, 129, 187, 252 ancient 24, 75, 109, 219, 233 ice

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10, 73, 131, 207 nuclear power 270, 271, 272 nuclear weapons 141, 212, 233, 272 nuclear winter xviii, 125, 233, 272 Nyos Lake, Cameroon 232 oceans acidification 53-6, 203 ancient 108, 110, 199-203, 219, 220, 223, 229-30, 233 anoxic 223-4, 227, 229, 236, 237, 267 carbon sequestering 175

Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone

by Juli Berwald  · 14 May 2017  · 397pp  · 113,304 words

on our planet tells a unique millennia-long success story worthy of our consideration. The piece David was working on at the time was on ocean acidification, which is known as global warming’s evil twin. The oceans have sucked up about 28 percent of the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted from

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wrote. “Because research of this kind can have lasting policy implications, it is important not to attribute all perceived ecological change to ‘global warming’ or ‘ocean acidification’ without reasonable evidence from an appropriately broad data set.” Amid the usual staid scientific results and discussion, here was language that appealed to scientists to

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the murderer in a Sherlock Holmes mystery, “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane.” Steve Haddock, whose cautionary words about drawing connections between jellyfish and ocean acidification helped to pull me into the world of jellyfish, summed up the turn of the twentieth century as “a golden age of gelata.” In the

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if I wanted to write a book that mattered, I needed to tackle the bigger problems on our planet, like climate change, ocean warming, and ocean acidification, all of which stem from our unchecked use of fossil fuels. “Just to play devil’s advocate,” I’d retorted, “you could say, Look how

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went diving in Israel but that my life had taken me away from the sea. I told him how writing captions for an article about ocean acidification made me wonder whether jellyfish would really be winners in a future acidified world, and then I fell down the rabbit hole when I started

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are the infrastructure that allows for the great biological diversity of the reef. Besides the chance to walk memory lane back to Eilat, Maoz’s ocean acidification work was one of the major reasons I wanted to visit this lab. I wanted an answer to the question that got me started on

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I’d been following jellyfish research, I had found only a few studies that touched on the question. “I don’t like the assumption that ocean acidification won’t affect them,” Maoz told me when I asked him about the fate of jellyfish. “They are highly dependent on their statoliths.” Statoliths are

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differently from normal. The life cycle was affected as well. It wasn’t a big study, but it showed that jellyfish are not insensitive to ocean acidification.” “How did the jellies swim in the acidified water?” I wondered. “They were sluggish. Like they were drugged. The biggest risk for jellies and low

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find that some jellies in some places are better at surviving acid trips than others. Maoz continued: “With coral, we can see how they survive ocean acidification. Their metabolism has to change. There are changes in tissue formation. And we know some species have survived past acidification events. But how do jellies

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do it? It’s not in the geologic record. Do jellyfish find an oceanographic refuge? A place in the ocean where the ocean acidification isn’t so bad? Is it behavioral? Or do they change their life cycle, hunker down as polyps or just hang out in the surface

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the atmosphere was what got me started on this long and winding jellyfish road in the first place. It produces global warming’s evil consequence, ocean acidification. If I was going to help save the oceans, I could try to do it through the atmosphere. I found a local group of citizen

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Chicago Press, 2012). The piece David was working on: Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Acid Sea,” National Geographic, April 2011, http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2011/04/ocean-acidification/kolbert-text. increased the growth of the planted tube: Jennifer E. Purcell, “Climate Effects on Formation of Jellyfish and Ctenophore Blooms: A Review,” Journal of

Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs

by Juli Berwald  · 4 Apr 2022  · 495pp  · 114,451 words

Grand Challenges. But then you confront our big, complicated, powerful planet. You confront the unpredictability of biology and the unrelenting march of development, climate change, ocean acidification, and pollution. You could put a price on it, but what did Saving Coral Reefs really mean? Was it even possible? Up on the stage

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lower. At a lower pH, marine creatures that build calcium carbonate structures must use extra energy to find the carbonate building blocks they need. That ocean acidification compromises their ability to do other important things, like gather food and reproduce. About a decade ago, just as the atmospheric CO2 pushed against 400

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per million for the first time, a threshold that hadn’t been reached at any time in human history, marine scientists began raising alarms about ocean acidification. Early predictions put coral at risk when atmospheric carbon dioxide reached 450 parts per million, which is expected around 2050. Coral would undergo complete demise

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per million, which will occur before the end of the century if nothing changes. However, when scientists tested coral at lower pHs, the impacts of ocean acidification on corals were ambiguous. Sometimes they found impeded growth. In other cases corals were unaffected. Inside coral tissue, an incredible system of pH control—what

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. In September 2019, researchers released pulses of carbon dioxide to a study site on the Great Barrier Reef for two hundred days to mimic future ocean acidification conditions. They found that places without living coral eroded twice as fast. And because so much coral has died, we are already nearing a situation

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erosion that . . . was erasing humankind’s terrestrial platform.” Today, we are at risk of losing the formula for that antidote, but probably not because of ocean acidification. For corals, the alchemy of light and stone depends on the algae’s solar power. When the temperatures rise and the algae abandon the coral

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motivate you to stop smoking.” None of the arguments were specifically focused on the ocean. (And all omitted the objection that the side effect of ocean acidification from the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would continue.) Amid these admittedly relevant points, I couldn’t shake the fact that all of

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TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT twenty-two million tons each day: The Ocean Portal Team, Reviewed by Jennifer Bennett (NOAA), “Ocean Acidification,” Smithsonian, April 2018, https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/ocean-acidification. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT that build calcium carbonate structures: Andrew Alden, “Calcite vs Aragonite,” ThoughtCo, August 27, 2020

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-didnt-exist-15938. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT coral at lower pHs: O. Hoegh-Guldberg et al., “Coral Reefs under Rapid Climate Change and Ocean Acidification,” Science 318, no. 1737 (2007), https://fish.gov.au/Archived-Reports/2014/Documents/Hoegh_guldberg_et_al_2007_coral_reef_climate_change.pdf. F. Marubini

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Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 286, no. 1900 (2019): 20182840, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2018.2840. Nathaniel R. Mollica et al., “Ocean Acidification Affects Coral Growth by Reducing Skeletal Density,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115, no. 8 (2018): 1754

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Ocean,” Smithsonian, August 2012, https://ocean.si.edu/ecosystems/coral-reefs/sneak-peek-future-coral-reefs-acidifying-ocean. Malcolm McCulloch et al., “Coral Resilience to Ocean Acidification and Global Warming through pH Up-Regulation,” Nature Climate Change 2, no. 8 (2012): 623–27, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229429812_Coral_resilience_to

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_ocean_acidification_and_global_warming_through_pH_up-regulation. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT biological chisels: J. Stanley Gardiner, “Photosynthesis and Solution in Formation of Coral

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Books, 2005), 146. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT By 2100: Christopher E. Cornwall et al, “Global Declines in Coral Reef Calcium Carbonate Production under Ocean Acidification and Warming,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 118, no. 21 (2021): e2015265118, https://www.pnas.org/content

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and coral bleaching, 7, 73 and geoengineering proposal, 248–50 impact of COVID-19 pandemic, 262 methane compared with, 247 Montreal Protocol on, 300n9 and ocean acidification, 50–53 and Paris Climate Accords, 288, 322n284 reduction efforts, 14 and Tragedy of the Commons model, 116 Caribbean and coral bleaching, 62, 64, 65

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and 50 Reefs study, 229 and genetics research, 274 and Horniman Museum corals, 206 Low Isles expedition, 57–60 and Mars restoration projects, 147 and ocean acidification research, 52 photographic survey of, 25 recovery from damage, 270 and Reef Futures meeting, 17–19 resistance to restoration efforts, 225 Saville-Kent on, 3

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

by Oliver Morton  · 26 Sep 2015  · 469pp  · 142,230 words

him to look at what dissolved carbon dioxide might do to ocean chemistry – that is, at the problem, only then coming to the fore, of ‘ocean acidification’.* That dissolving carbon dioxide in water produces a weak acid is basic chemistry, and that doing so on a global scale might change the pH

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doubling of the carbon-dioxide level went from being, as Caldeira put it, ‘a nightmare to avoid’ to ‘the least we can get away with’, ocean acidification took on a new importance, and Caldeira was one of the first to recognize it. It has since become the topic of a great deal

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emissions reduction, Crutzen went on; the reduction of emissions offered the surest way to a stable climate, and it was the only way to curtail ocean acidification. This stress on acidification was one of the clever things about the way Crutzen framed his argument. The fact that sunshine geoengineering can do nothing

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critics of the idea as a fatal shortcoming. Crutzen saw that it could be a political asset. Because sunshine geoengineering efforts would do nothing about ocean acidification, they did much less to undermine the politics surrounding the reduction of carbon-dioxide emissions. Scientists working on stratospheric veils to stabilize temperatures could reassure

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would still be an overwhelming need to control carbon-dioxide emissions. The most important thing about the essay, though, was not what it said about ocean acidification or anything else. It was that everything it said was said by Paul Crutzen, saviour of the ozone layer. ‘The messenger was the message,’ Schneider

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in the hydrological cycle in much of the tropics and sub-tropics; the rhythms and intensities of El Niño and La Niña events have shifted. Ocean acidification has devastated many reefs and some other ecosystems, and its effects are worsening. And though the temperature has stabilized, various changes the engineering nations had

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first, some more by the second, but they all realized that the two were not mutually exclusive. But by trying to nullify the risks of ocean acidification, at least for itself, the coral-island nation pushes too far, and the middle ground breaks down. The Concert falls apart, other veilmakers step in

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that countries already engaged in a radical programme of solar geoengineering are falling out because of the moral hazard posed by small-scale action against ocean acidification. In retrospect, though, the Concert’s idea that only one aspect of the earthsystem would be geoengineered was never likely to be stable. The dynamic

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, at least hard to defend. At the same time that it has a huge appeal, though, there is something about trying to opt out of ocean acidification that seems to be a step too far, and it upsets a lot of people. Not that there is anything they can do about it

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adapt or move – some cities have built impressive sea walls, some low-lying rural areas exist now just in the memories of millions of refugees. Ocean acidification has been bad for some species; most marine ecosystems have undergone change as a result, and in some cases that change has been dramatic. But

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). The political context of Teller’s contribution is detailed in Oreskes and Conway (2012). Ken Caldeira’s short but highly influential initial contribution to the ocean acidification debate is in Caldeira and Wickett (2003); on coral reefs, see Hoegh-Guldberg et al. (2007). The pivotal discussion of geoengineering is in Crutzen (2006

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the Shortfalls of Multinational Governance’ Carbon and Climate Law Review 3 168 Hoegh-Guldberg, Ove et al. (2007) ‘Coral Reefs Under Rapid Climate Change and Ocean Acidification’ Science 318 1737–1742 Holton, James R. et al. (1995) ‘Stratosphere–Troposphere Exchange’ Reviews of Geophysics 33 403–439 Hornborg, Alf (2014) ‘Technology as Fetish

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(2009), 10–11, 21, 146; accord, 165 coral reefs: creation, 233; and fertilizer run-off, 198; future scenarios, 362, 363–4; and heat, 292; and ocean acidification, 152; protecting, 251, 292, 294–5; and volcanic eruptions, 95 counter-geoengineering, 341–2 Cox, Peter, 240 Crookes, Sir William, 178–84, 194, 201–2

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Wars programme, 156, 334; Teller’s work, 148–9; treaties and test bans, 59, 144, 361 Nye, David, 101, 123 Obama, Barack, 144, 326–7 oceans: acidification from carbon dioxide, 152–4, 251, 362, 363–4, 371; carbon in, 221, 222; and CCS, 246; and climate change, 151; cooling methods, 292; currents

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century

by Ronald Bailey  · 20 Jul 2015  · 417pp  · 109,367 words

about the likely trajectory of future climate change. This includes future temperature increases, sea level rise, shifts in the amounts of snow and rain, and ocean acidification. Next, we will analyze the possibilities of adapting to a changing climate and ask what we owe to future generations. Third, we will parse the

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future warming will be slower, giving humanity more time to adapt and to decarbonize its energy production technologies. Higher climate sensitivity would mean the opposite. Ocean Acidification As the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the amount of carbonic acid is increased, thus making the ocean more acidic. As noted previously

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waters of the oceans has increased by about 26 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The IPCC 2014 Adaptation report observes, “Impacts of ocean acidification range from changes in organismal physiology and behavior to population dynamics and will affect marine ecosystems for centuries if emissions continue.” Some ocean denizens like

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], our study, performed at the organismic level on eight of the main calcifiers in Moorea, suggests that tropical reefs might not be affected by OA [ocean acidification] as strongly or as rapidly as previously supposed.” They found that overall reef calcification declined by about 10 percent when carbon dioxide was doubled. In

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exposed to levels of carbon dioxide in high-end projections for the end of this century. Nevertheless, published reviews of research on the effects of ocean acidification resulting from high levels of extra carbon dioxide find the overall effects on marine organisms are negative. Of course, if emissions are cut to keep

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future temperature increases down, that would also limit the effects of ocean acidification. How Much Will Global Warming Cost? Assume global warming. There are two ways to address concerns about warming: adaptation and mitigation. In 2014, the IPCC

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cause for declining marine populations is overfishing, but habitat degradation could play a bigger role over the course of this century if global warming and ocean acidification continue apace. To rein in excessive exploitation of wild marine populations, the authors recommend among other policies the adoption of incentive-based fisheries. One of

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Future Learning About Climate Sensitivity.” Geophysical Research Letters 41.7 (April 16, 2014): 2543–2552. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL059484/abstract. “Impacts of ocean acidification”: IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, April 2014, Chapter 6, 138. ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/WGIIAR5-Chap6_FGDall.pdf. as acidity

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/pdf/1748-9326_8_3_034003.pdf. corals might reach a tipping point: O. Hoegh-Guldberg et al., “Coral Reefs Under Rapid Climate Change and Ocean Acidification.” Science 318.5857 (December 2007): 1737–1742. www.geneseo.edu/~bosch/Hoegh-Guldberg.pdf. tropical reefs might not be affected: S. Comeau et al., “The

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/toc/vol_58/issue_1/0388.pdf. cold-water Mediterranean corals: C. Maier et al., “Respiration of Mediterranean Cold-Water Corals Is Not Affected by Ocean Acidification as Projected for the End of the Century.” Biogeosciences 10 (August 27, 2013): 5671–5680, biogeosciences.net/10/5671/2013/bg-10-5671-2013.pdf

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; see also S. J. Hennige et al., “Short-Term Metabolic and Growth Responses of the Cold-Water Coral Lophelia pertusa to Ocean Acidification.” Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography 99 (January 2014): 27–35. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967064513002774. overall effects on marine

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organisms: Astrid C. Wittman and Hans-O. Pörtner, “Sensitivities of Extant Animal Taxa to Ocean Acidification.” Nature Climate Change 3 (August 25, 2013): 995–1001, www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v3/n11/full/nclimate1982.html; and also, Kristy J. Kroeker et

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al., “Impacts of Ocean Acidification on Marine Organisms: Quantifying Sensitivities and Interaction with Warming.” Global Change Biology 19.6 (June 2013): 1884–1896. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles

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carbon emissions budget and projections capture and storage climate sensitivity to consensus on current Kyoto Protocol on natural gas reduction in nuclear power reduction in ocean acidification from renewable energy and tax trade Carson, Rachel on DDT modern environmentalism from on synthetic estrogen Carter, Jimmy Cavalieri, Liebe CBD. See Center for Biological

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Clayton, Blake Clements, Frederic climate change adaptation climate sensitivity and developing nations’ aid for Dismal Theorem on glacial melting natural disasters and natural variability and ocean acidification and overview political polarization on projections sea-level rise skeptics temperature increase temperature increase hiatus transient climate response and climate change costs and benefits of

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Ventures intergenerational equity Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on climate adaptation on climate mitigation on extinction on natural disasters on natural gas efficiency on ocean acidification on temperature increase on water privatization International Energy Agency (IEA) International Food Policy Research Institute International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) International Monetary Fund

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. See National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Nordhaus, William North, Douglass Norton, Seth novel ecosystems nuclear power Obama, Barack obesity Ocampo, Daniel M. Ocampo, José Antonio ocean acidification biodiversity protection cloud whitening from heat storage in OECD. See Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development oil Arab and Iranian crises consumption patterns doomsayer

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions

by Greta Thunberg  · 14 Feb 2023  · 651pp  · 162,060 words

fish, where it forms a weak acid. The enrichment of CO2 in ocean water and the subsequent fall in pH is called ocean acidification. Rising CO2 levels and the resulting ocean acidification place marine organisms and ecosystems in peril, adding to the dangers of warming and oxygen loss. Acidity has already risen by approximately

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30 per cent. Even if current efforts to reduce and finally stop CO2 emissions are fully successful, some ocean acidification and the hazards it presents to marine organisms and ecosystems will remain long term. Thus far, we have observed that

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ocean acidification often causes reduced calcification – leading to, for instance, the thinning or fracture of shells on organisms – or the destabilization of carbonate-based ecosystems such as

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food chain. So the oceans are simultaneously warming and acidifying – and it is as yet unclear to what extent the effects of oxygen deficiency and ocean acidification are already influencing or exacerbating the impacts created by warming oceans. Complex organisms such as animals and plants thrive in a relatively narrow temperature range

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required. These are some of the lowest-carbon sources of food around. Farming seaweed can provide a range of benefits, from helping to reduce local ocean acidification, to harbouring biodiversity, to buffering against the impacts of storms on coastlines, and it has the potential to grow into an industry supporting tens of

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–2, 388 nuclear power, 224, 225, 228, 229, 268, 326 nudging techniques, 338 nutrient cycles, 115, 253 nuts, 150, 248, 249 O Oats, 342, 343 ocean: acidification, 6, 7, 34, 84–5, 344, 346; anoxic, 7; Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), 39, 81–3, 82, 344; blue carbon, 346, 347; calcification, 84

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made

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