"Outside the laboratory, however, just a handful of studies have linked falling pH levels to damaged shells."
This is odd considering those in the aquarium hobby have known this as common knowledge for a long time now.
Maintaining reef tanks has made it extremely apparent to me just how badly we're harming our oceans even with small changes in chemistry. I hope articles such as this can help make the general public more aware of the dangers.
You make a real good point. There is something about getting your hands into something that convinces you of reality. Maybe what we need to do is try to encourage more people to take up marine aquariums as a hobby.
Your second line is the same that was used in regards to global warming and the hole in the ozone layer. It's a straw man, since nobody (sane) is saying it's 100% the fault of humans. That doesn't mean we can't affect something that large, we just take some time to do so.
The question is not "are we doing damage" The quesiton is how to fix it... Fix it with out destroying the economy and leading to billions of human life losses.
At this point many extreme climate change activists want to send the world back to the 1700's level of technology which while would save the planet, bring about the end of the human race as we know it
"At this point many extreme climate change activists want to send the world back to the 1700's level of technology"
Really, who? I can't see the people in the 18th century using PV (or much electricity at all for that matter).
I think the real problem is that people somehow believe "the economy" is more important than the environment. Destroying "the economy" would have little to no effect at all on about two thirds of the world's population.
Fixing (and preserving) the environment will have an enormous benefit to the entire world population, with the exception of the very small number of people who currently profit from treating the environment as an infinite resource, or a static back-drop to our own civilization.
Destroying "the economy" would have little to no effect at all on about two thirds of the world's population.
I don't think you have a good grasp of how interdependent almost all modern national economies are today, regardless of their current size or per capita GDP. There is an almost inconceivably huge difference in aggregate quality of life (especially for the poorest!) between a 2100 that saw a century with 3.5% global annual real "gross world product" growth and one where growth averaged 2.5%.
Some back of the envelope calculation tells me it's a choice between a global economy worth ~$620T and one that's worth ~$1460T. You can pay for a lot of amelioration when your economy is that big, and still have a bunch left over to make people's lives so much better than they'd have in an economy less than half as productive.
Obviously there is a potentially serious downside to emissions growth that goes along with that economic growth. But the consequences of even moderately throttling the world economy to deal with it have huge costs that can't be waved away.
Not arguing your main point, but going on a tangent: One wouldn't need to "seriously throttle down the world economy" to achieve significant amelioration of pollution. There is plenty of low-hanging fruit to lower industrial emissions and pollutants. Everywhere you look at in industrial sites there are stupid environmentally damaging practices, such as incinerating garbage and spilling chemicals into water sources without as much as a sorting process, which let extremely nocive pollutants into the enviroment. In the face of such irresponsible behavior, which shows zero concern for its consequences and possibilities of improvement, I don't buy that improving emissions is this insurmountable problem that would cause our economy to implode. Fact is, "standard" industrial practices are idiotic, misguided and unnecessarily destructive to a completely inexcusable degree.
On the other hand, pollution also significantly throttles down the global economy. You're saying losing 1% would be extremely bad in the long run. Well, in China's case it's estimated that as much as five to TEN percent of GDP is lost anually due to the effects of pollution. That figure has grown from a rounding error at the beginning of their country's industrialization to an aching burden today, and which shows no sign of slowing down unless something is done about it.
CO2 is not a simple pollutant that in trace quantities causes harm, which we can almost completely delete with semi-trivial changes in tech. That is the story of a lot of other air pollutants.
Burning fossil fuels for energy necessarily involves generating CO2. All combustion does - that is the end product of essentially all of the 'carbon' in 'hydrocarbon'. Reducing CO2 requires reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned for energy. Speaking as someone that has spent a lot of time on this area: There are no effective substitutes, at all, for reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned for energy. Carbon capture & storage is a red herring with no long-term effective mechanism, a very limited temporary reservoir system, and energy companies that don't even want to use those without the government writing them a huge check. Affirmative carbon credits for things like forest-growing are very limited by nature (forests only take in so much), and more effective as a way of preserving ecosystems than reducing anthropogenic carbon - so far they're mostly guilt-exemption tickets which change nothing about the degree of resource utilization happening. Ocean seeding seems to sequester a lot less than we first expected, because other nutrients become bottlenecks.
Don't get me wrong, I remain in favor of phasing out fossil fuels for most purposes, but they are really useful things, and we're going to have to attempt to leapfrog the entire 20th century of mechanized technology in developing countries to do it, after we complete the process in our own economies. This is not a small thing to ask.
You're conflating the amount of money involved with the number of people involved. This rarely works for global situations.
The land-owners of the Alberta Oil Sands (last I heard the Koch brothers were #1 in this regard) have little or no incentive to put the money they make back into the Alberta community. They almost certainly have some token gesture scheme in place that will provide <1% of the profit to local funding, but that's just PR spin.
The population growth is decreasing due to (mainly) education. The disparity in the distribution of wealth is only growing greater. Those in the USA and Europe should realize that this isn't happening in their favour. In 2000, the USA was 22.61% of the world's GDP with China at 4.62%. The estimate for the next 6 years puts China at 26.79% and the USA at 15.45%.
Try telling the billions of people in the world living hand to mouth that the actions of some for-profit corporation will mean that they see an improvement in their quality of life.
Try telling the billions of people in the world living hand to mouth that the actions of some for-profit corporation will mean that they see an improvement in their quality of life.
Hundreds of millions of people in China who would have been living hand to mouth a few decades ago are now living much fuller, longer, happier lives because their nation provided cheap labor and manufacturing for "some for-profit corporation[s]". A global economy half today's size couldn't have supported them in that way, and a global economy of 2100 cut in half by lower growth rates will have many more relatively poor people. I'm not sure what the Koch brothers have to do with that. Your argument does not appear to coherently respond to what I wrote.
It sounds like you're actually defending the labour practices of China over the last few decades. If so, I can't argue with you.
EDIT: In addition, the improvement of China's living standards should never be used as an example of capitalist success. China was at a cultural and economic low due to the effects of the Chinese "Cultural Revolution". Anything would have seen an improvement in living standards across a lot of China.
The point about the Koch brothers is that a project with staggering environmental implications is being controlled by a very small number of parties, when the actual people living in that same environment are going to receive little or no compensation for the destruction of said environment.
> The land-owners of the Alberta Oil Sands (last I heard the Koch brothers were #1 in this regard)
A claim made with so little support that the Washington Post was quickly forced to retract it. In fact, the reporters (as distinct from the newspaper) retracted the claim the day after the story ran.
From your linked article "Where the first story proclaimed the Kochs are the largest lease holder in the Canadian oil sands, Mufson and Eilperin now say they are “one of the region’s largest.” That’s quite a difference. Indeed, if the Kochs own leases for 1.1 million acres, as claimed in the original story, they are not “the biggest lease holder in Canada’s oil sands.” At least two other companies (Shell and Cenovus) hold more."
How does this change my point that a very small number of people control the profits to made from a hugely damaging project?
It doesn't matter that the Koch brothers aren't, as the WP originally stated, the leading lease holders. They share the majority of the total lease hold with other parties that are only interested in extracting the oil.
Implying that my point is invalid due to the Koch brother's only owning a substantial percentage, and not the majority, of the lease hold is disingenuous.
Should I forgive the actions of the Koch brothers now that I know that they only “one of the region’s largest" lease holders?
> Implying that my point is invalid due to the Koch brother's only owning a substantial percentage, and not the majority, of the lease hold is disingenuous.
First, I can't resist pointing out that it was never claimed they held the majority of the land; it was claimed they were the largest single holder. If you own 10% of something and nobody else owns more than 7%, you still don't own the majority of it.
Anyway, I don't think it affects your point at all; that's why my conclusion was "work on your rhetoric". Your passing mention of the Kochs can't undermine your point if it's invalid for the same reasons it doesn't support your point if it's correct (which, naturally, it isn't). It's just there to shock and dismay your audience. I'm not here to point out that you're basing an argument on faulty premises; you don't seem to be using much in the way of premises at all. I'm here to point out (right now) that scaring your audience isn't a good substitute for discussing an issue, and (now and before) that while you seem to feel strongly about this, you don't seem to be very well informed, or even to follow developments that you bring up as interesting for one day after they make the news.
Thankyou, I apologise for my misunderstanding of your original conclusion.
I originally used the Koch involvement with the Alberta tar sands as an example I thought would be appreciated by the predominantly US based audience. I, however, am based in Australia, and am usually concerned with the issues of my local area. I apologise for using my out-of-date information as my sole data point, and it's remiss of me not to have, at least, confirmed that the information I'd read hadn't been falsified since I'd read it.
I should have at least only stated their large involvement with the project, and not paraphrased an incorrect article to support my point.
if tomorrow a law was passed the said only PV could be used to produce electricity, rates would sky rocket 3 to 5 times what they are today, the net effect of that would be that the vast majority of the population would not longer be able to afford electricity for their homes. Not to mention the price of goods would sky rocket leaving the vast majority of the population unable to buy anything beyond basic food stuffs if they could afford that. Entire Industries would collapse, which I am sure your fine with because less pollution.
So most people would be using Candles for light, and walking to their jobs (if they had jobs) etc
You seems to thing we can just switch to wind/solar/... with no effects on industry, prices, or quality of life. Everything would just be peachy and we will all sing kumbaya in the streets
The vast majority of the population are already unable to afford electricity for their homes, and the price of goods (for them) is so dynamic due to local supply and demand that there is no guarantee that they can afford basic food stuffs.
Yes, entire industries will collapse. This has happened before (Indian slavery by the East India Company?), most would say we're better off for it.
How on earth can you make such absurd statements without the smallest shred of evidence? I'm not interested in arguing with you, but unsubstantiated claims are worse than useless.
Personally? I think we can use technology to dig ourselves out of this problem without needing to revert to "1700's level of technology" (which actually obliterated old growth forests/whale populations).
It's not a question of how at this point, it's a question of research and desire to change. We have 4+ TRILLION dollars for wars in the middle east (at least partially driven by a desire for stable oil) but we can't find even 1% of that for nuclear power research/testing? Batteries? Solar? Our priorities as a society are in the wrong place.
Unfortunately most environmentalists believe in the same people that are wasting all those resources on war... Government. They look to the governments of the world to violently effect change... That is not the solution.
>send the world back to the 1700's level of technology which while would save the planet
That is a pretty strong claim you are making their. We have already mucked up the carbon cycle be adding vast amounts of carbon into the system (carbon that took billions of years to get sequestered in the first place). This change alone would be sufficient to cause massive damage (and likely a mass extinction), and the 'only' way to fix it is to actively remove carbon from the environment and sequester it again. I put only in quotes because there may be ways we can prevent a lot of the damage by intervening at other stages of the process (for example, find a way to replace the functionality of species that are directly affected to prevent a cascade effect through the entire system).
Fix it with out destroying the economy and leading to billions of human life losses.
I'm coming to the conclusion that both of those are likely unavoidable even in the best case. The present economic system cannot survive, and a stable, sustainable human population at anything remotely resembling present levels of affluence is likely in the 500 million - 2 billion range.
How the transition happens is the interesting question.
Apparently these sensitive snails are dissolving p <because> they are in an alkaline ocean of around pH 8.14. Amazing. The paper does not point out that some parts of the ocean naturally vary in pH by 1.4 units. Of course none of the massive amounts of chemical junk dumped into the oceans and poisoning the fish we eat, has any effect on these snails. Did they check?
“This natural variability has prompted the suggestion that “an appropriate null hypothesis may be, until evidence is obtained to the contrary, that major biogeochemical processes in the oceans other than calcification will not be fundamentally different under future higher CO2/lower pH conditions””
The evidence sounds a bit weak - as I understand the paper summary they collected a bunch of snails just the one time in 2011 and found a correlation between shell damage and the concentration on aragonite in the water which is a form of calcium carbonate of which the concentration presumably varies with acidity. There could be a bunch of reasons why some snails where more damaged - storms, different ages etc. One sample with no control experiments is pretty weak data. If you wanted to check it you could put a bunch of snails in tanks and with varying pH and see if the effect is replicated I guess.
"In tanks filled with seawater, they raised 18 species of marine organisms that build calcium carbonate shells or skeletons. The scientists exposed the tanks to air containing CO2 at today’s level (400 parts per million, or ppm), at levels that climate models forecast for 100 years from now (600 ppm) and 200 years from now (900 ppm), and at a level (2,850 ppm) that should cause the types of calcium carbonate in shells (aragonite and high-magnesium calcite) to dissolve in seawater.
The test tanks’ miniature atmospheres produced elevated CO2 in the tiny captive oceans, generating higher acidity. The researchers measured the rate of shell growth for the diverse species ranging from crabs to algae, from both temperate and tropical waters. They included organisms such as corals and coralline algae, which form foundations for critical habitats, and organisms that support seafood industries (clams, oysters, scallops, conchs, urchins, crabs, lobsters, and prawns)."
There seems to be an established name for what you call mixing an acid and a base: Neutralization Chemistry.
Even freshwater lakes like lake erie ar pH 8.4, yet for some reason when articles are published about pH variance, it is never referred to as "neutralization" but rather "acidification"--with no mention of the net-alkalinity of the solution. The latter would paint the former phrasing as self-evidently awkward, of course.
Conversely, acid doesn't "eat away" at anything, it's that things happily dissolve themselves into acid.
These things don't disolve into acid--because they disolve into dilute alkaline solutions.
This is unlike acid rain--which is actually acidic:
Pure water has a pH of 7.0. However, normal rain is slightly acidic because carbon dioxide (CO2) dissolves into it forming weak carbonic acid, giving the resulting mixture a pH of approximately 5.6 at typical atmospheric concentrations of CO2. As of 2000, the most acidic rain falling in the U.S. has a pH of about 4.3.
The Ph of seawater is never acidic, and is by itself actually complex. See, eg:
"A National Research Council study released in April 2010 likewise concluded that "the <level of acid> in the oceans is increasing at an unprecedented rate."
The "level of acid" in the ocean?
Surely a scientist would say "the ph is declining..." or "alkalinity is being reduced" or the maybe "solution's alkalinity is being neutralized"?
What's the likely solution here? Is it possible to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere without damaging it in some other way? Or are we destined to slowly but surely destroy this planet?
The planet survived cyanobacteria [1], which dumped vast amounts of highly toxic oxygen into the atmosphere. The planet had a mass extinction, a global freeze, but life managed to pull through (even Cyanobacteria survived). Compared to that, our addition of Carbon to the atmosphere is minuscule.
To your first question, it is entirely possible to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, but it is expensive. Consider how much of GDP was put into getting the Carbon there in the first place, and that burning fossil fuels is cheaper then recovering the carbon they emitted. The most promising solution I have heard is to take an organic approach. Instead of sequestering it ourselves, engineer the planet to do it for us. For example, we can dump nutrients into largely dead regions of the ocean stimulating photosynthesis, and let the carbon fall to the bottom (as a solid).
It is somewhat self-stabilising over time, but the first step is to stop putting it into the atmosphere in the first place. Or at least reduce the rate. That implies not opening new fossil fuel fields; not fracking, and not extracting the tar sands.
Yes, that is the likely solution. The ocean currently absorbs a lot of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and mitigating climate change. It is a tall order though given how much carbon dioxide we put in the atmosphere every single day.
Once we (global we here, the US alone would do little - China and India are the main ones that have to act) stop burning coal for power things will fix themself.
Turn your computer off. The CO2 that acidified that ocean came from the fossil fuels + oxygen that were burned to make the power needed to build that wind turbine that powers your computer. So, if you want to save the life of a snail, turn off your computer. And stop breathing.
Instead of having a 'war on terror' and a trillion dollar arms trade we could get serious about greening this planet, as in planting green things that look pretty, take in CO2 and breathe out oxygen. If we set our minds to it and found some political will we could do it, to create a true paradise on earth and not have this fear of climate change. We could steward this planet whichever way we wanted rather than always going for the tragedy of the commons and electing the evil, corrupt, lying retards such as the politicians we have.
I thought we had reached the turning point (of no turning back) about 15 years ago when action would have been worthwhile. But, since then we have gone the other way, hit on fracking and decided to go for mass die-off.
Are we to be no better than bacteria on a petri dish, to bloom exponentially, hit resource depletion and die off? Is that it? Arthur C Clarke and Carl Sagan had us conquering new worlds rather than just assuming the zombie apocalypse will miss our generation.
That will also stop you eating, you'll die, decompose, and the carbon will become available to other things that respire. Humans don't breath out any carbon that wasn't recently in the atmosphere. What's needed is to somehow have more carbon sequestered in things-that-are-not-the-ocean-or-air. Some of that can be biomass. Some of that is "big puddles of gunk deep underground" (which is what we've been un-sequestering). In principle, doing more manufacturing with carbon (carbon fiber, synthetic diamonds, plastics) would help provided the carbon itself came from the atmosphere (or something that would've ended up there) and the energy was produced without emitting still more carbon - in practice, the amounts involved in manufacturing are probably too small to be relevant...
This strange behaviour whether its creatures dying and filling up the ocean floor 98 percent or this snail thing is related to the fukushima radiation which is reaching the west coast. No other explanation can possible explain these which has never happened in history.
This strange behaviour whether its creatures dying and filling up the ocean floor 98 percent or this snail thing is related to the fuku shima radiation which is reaching the west coast. No other explanation can possible explain these which has never happened in history.
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This is odd considering those in the aquarium hobby have known this as common knowledge for a long time now.
Maintaining reef tanks has made it extremely apparent to me just how badly we're harming our oceans even with small changes in chemistry. I hope articles such as this can help make the general public more aware of the dangers.