Ocean Acidification Occurring at Unprecedented Rates

[GliderGuider]

Ocean Acidification Occurring at Unprecedented Rates

This week, at the Third International Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World in Monterey, California, Dr. Daniela Schmidt of the University of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences warns us that the current rates of ocean acidification are unlike any other in the Earth's history.

Dr Schmidt said: "Ocean acidification has happened before, sometimes with large consequences for marine ecosystems. But within the last 300 million years, never has the rate of ocean acidification been comparable to the ongoing acidification."

When ocean acidification occurred in the past, it was noted that species responded to "the warming, acidification, change in nutrient input and loss of oxygen — the same processes that we now see in our oceans." However, according to Dr Schmidt "the geological record also shows changes in species distribution, changes in species composition, changes in calcification and growth and in a few cases extinction."

Although similarities exist, no past event can serve as a model for future projections due to the unprecedented releases of anthropogenic CO2.

We are releasing CO2 10 times faster than the continent-scale vulcanism of the Deccan traps, 65 million years ago. That event released its CO2 over 30,000 years compared to the 200 years we've taken so far.

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[hatrack]

2. Happy to recommend as we . . .

[CRH]

3. K&R, n/t

[phantom power]

4. bad

sooooo bad

[Gregorian]

5. It all happened so fast. About 100 years. That's 40,000 DAYS!!!

This is what makes me so concerned. It happened in only a short number of days, and the worst part happened toward the end, which means...well.

[Junkdrawer]

6. And there's no easy GeoEngineering fix for that....

Temperature, well, maybe if we're willing to risk Ozone destruction and God-knows what else.

But Global Warming's evil twin is just a body blow.

[wtmusic]

7. As Fukushima fades in memory, don't forget how bad nuclear power is

At least 10x worse than ocean acidification.

[ellisonz]

8. I think we can appreciate the diminished state of our oceans...

...and still think nuclear power needs to go away.

[wtmusic]

13. Really?

That would imply you have a better solution.

And there isn't one that doesn't involve pixie dust that's available soon enough to make a difference.

Really.

[ellisonz]

22. Do you realize how much of the world gets a substantial portion of their food from the ocean?

Really.

[wtmusic]

24. You seem to be agreeing with me

but I'm not sure.

Nuclear power is the best way to reduce carbon emissions, and preserve the ocean.

[ellisonz]

25. "Nuclear power is the best way to reduce carbon emissions, and preserve the ocean."

Nuclear power also generates toxic wastes that lasts forever. Green technology is the way!

[NickB79]

18. 10X as bad? And you base this on what, exactly?

Ocean acidification is currently helping to eradicate the vast majority of the world's coral reefs, living structures that have existed for hundreds of thousands of years, and are considered the rain forests of the ocean. We can't even count the number of species that will be lost from this; it is truly a global extinction-level event. This is an unprecedented blow to the environment in recorded human history. And I haven't even mentioned the damage being done to zooplankton, a vital link in the ocean food chain, that lowered pH levels have on their ability to generate protective shells.

You really think that Fukushima, as bad as it was, still is, and will continue to be for the next few decades, is comparable to this?

[wtmusic]

20. Forgot this

GG knows I'm sassing him.

[Nihil]

9. "Never has the rate of ocean acidification been comparable"

> Dr. Daniela Schmidt of the University of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences warns us that
> the current rates of ocean acidification are unlike any other in the Earth's history.
> Dr Schmidt said: "Ocean acidification has happened before, sometimes with large
> consequences for marine ecosystems. But within the last 300 million years, never has
> the rate of ocean acidification been comparable to the ongoing acidification."

F***.


BTW GliderGuider, your OP comment is slightly misleading:
> We are releasing CO2 10 times faster than the continent-scale vulcanism of the
> Deccan traps, 65 million years ago.

Although it is valid about the rate today being faster than that of the Deccan traps,
the "10 times faster" reference is actually for a different event:
>> She added that the most comparable event, most likely 10 times slower than the
>> current acidification, was 55 million years ago.

55Ma was the PETM (clathrates).
65Ma was the Deccan Traps (volcanism).
(See? Only four angels fit on the head of that particular pin after all!)

And yes, the tool monkeys are beating both of them!


(+ a quick cheer for the staff at the U of B )

[GliderGuider]

10. I was actually referring to one of my own calculations from 2008

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=129285&mesg_id=129362

We produce 130 times as much CO2 as all the volcanoes now active on Earth. Even if you go back to the Deccan or Siberian traps you may not find an equivalent. According to this page a flood basalt eruption of 2000 km^3 emits as much CO2 as we do from one year's worth of fossil fuels. The Deccan traps were up to 1000 times that big, but the various duration estimates I've seen point to the highest rate of vulcanism happening over at least 10,000 years, out of a total duration of perhaps a million years.

So we are emitting CO2 at least ten times faster than the Deccan traps, an eruption that is implicated in the K/T extinction.

Sorry I didn't specify that was my own calculation.

[GliderGuider]

11. One third of the CO2 we release dissolves in the oceans

Another third stays in the atmosphere.

That's over ten billion tonnes into the air and ten billion tonnes into the oceans, every year - cooking the planet and dissolving the fish...

Cooking the planet and dissolving the fish...
Cooking the planet and dissolving the fish...
Cooking the planet and dissolving the fish...

It's not going to stop until we cut CO2 emissions by 90% - and then keep it at that level for a thousand years.

Did I mention that we are cooking the planet and dissolving the fish?

[GliderGuider]

12. Can somebody remind me why we're doing this?

I thought somebody said it has something to do with flat screen TVs, cars and making more people...

But that can't be right. Killing an entire planet so we can watch I Love Lucy reruns with our kids and then drive to Denny's for dinner? It seems like such a small return for killing an entire planet.

[wtmusic]

14. Watching "I Love Lucy" doesn't have to generate any carbon

but you knew that.

[GliderGuider]

15. Making the TV does.

But you knew that.

[wtmusic]

16. No, it doesn't. nt

[GliderGuider]

17. Well, it apparently does so far.

Consumption levels, population numbers and carbon emissions are directly proportional. For example:



The wheels are falling off this shitbox civilization, and we're just standing around with our fingers up our noses. At least that's what the numbers say.

[wtmusic]

19. Your chart doesn't have any information about consumption.

The vertical axis just shows CO2 emissions, and the graph actually contradicts your own claim: if carbon emissions were directly proportional to population, you'd have a nice straight brown line across your graph - but it changes every year. In fact, none of those three values is directly proportional to the other.

Why not?

One reason might be the source of energy is a constantly shifting spectrum. Without drawing any hard and fast conclusions, it's interesting to note that a graph of the percentage of world energy derived from nuclear since 1980, flipped upside-down, would have an uncanny resemblance to your CO2 emission graph.



Nuclear goes down, CO2 goes up.

[GliderGuider]

21. I've been bashing these numbers some more:

I developed a rough-and ready approach using normalized CO2 emission, population and "consumption" figures (more on the data later) from 1970 to 2009. Here are the steps:

1. I normalized all data series (CO2, Population and "consumption" to be 1.0 in 1985.
   
2. In the following equation, nC means normalized CO2, nP is normalized population, and nC is normalized consumption.
   
3. I assumed that nC = xnP + (1-x)nC. What this means is that the proportion of CO2 associated with population growth (xnP) plus the remaining CO2 from consumption ((1-x)nC) add up to all the CO2 we emit. I warned you it was "rough and ready"...
   
4. I calculated the expected amount of CO2 to be produced each year (1970 to 2009) while varying x from 0 to 1.0.
   
5. I found the difference between the actual and expected values, and converted that to a percentage of the actual value.
   
6. I graphed the percentage values.
   
7. I varied the value of x over its range until I found the value that minimized the excursions of the percentage graph.
   
8. The value of x at which the excursions were the least was deemed to be the proportion of CO2 attributable to population growth.

The CO2 data came from the BP Statistical Review 2012; the population data came from the US Census Dept.
For "consumption" proxies I used two data sets. One was global GDP in constant 1990 Geary-Khamis dollars, from Maddison. The other was the sum of the tonnes of steel and cement produced world-wide, from the USGS. I tried the latter in order to minimize the influence of the non-productive portions of GDP.

The results in both cases were broadly similar - excursions were minimized with x=0.85, meaning that over the period 1970 to 2009 about 85% of our CO2 emissions were attributable to population levels, with only 15% attributable to consumption.

The GDP plot was noisier than the steel+cement plot, as you would expect, but the overall behaviour was the same. Using the steel+cement data set, the maximum excursions were +4%/-6%. Given the level of approximation involved with this analysis and the inherent variability of human numbers and activity, that seems like acceptable accuracy.

I'm fairly confident now in saying that we would be much better served by attacking climate change through population reduction rather than consumption reduction. How that might be accomplished is, as always, a very open and controversial question.

If people want to see my work, I'll put up a web page on it.

[wtmusic]

23. You're adding apples and oranges.

If you're going for straight proportions that's fine but everything has to multiply.

Adding numbers of people to tons of steel makes no sense at all.

[GliderGuider]

27. This is a first pass at getting something in the ballpark (i.e. within +/- 10%)

The question I'm trying to answer is, "does the CO2 emitted by those activities that are tied to human numbers (like food production) outweight the CO2 emitted by activities that just generate money or discretionary stuff?" If you can come up with a better proxy for optional consumption, I'm all ears. GDP sucks for this, because it adds apples, tractors and mortgage-backed securities.

I'm looking for a measure of consumption (probably industrial activity) that is broad enough to be realistic and whose per-capita consumption varies widely over time and between people (i.e. it's not tied to human numbers the way food consumption is).

The reason I chose steel and cement is that they are ubiquitous in industrial activity, and their CO2 contribution per tonne of each tends to be fairly constant. Yes, adding them together may muddy the waters a bit, but in the absence of any better proxy I felt it was close enough. At least it used two production metrics instead of just one. Perhaps normalizing each of those data sets for their respective CO2 emissions might be useful.

I'm open to help on this.

It looks so far as if simple growth in numbers and the activity directly associated with that is what's doing in the climate.

[GliderGuider]

28. I checked into the CO2 intensities of steel and cement manufacture

The numbers vary depending on the assumptions, but they're broadly comparable - steel is a bit higher at 1.8 tCO2/tonne, cement seems to be about 1.0 or so. I added varuiables into the spreadsheet to correct for this - they didn't make a lot of difference.

[wtmusic]

29. OK I think I get what you're going after

but I'm not sure if that question is solvable in any kind of helpful way. It begs a lot of questions: what portion of food production is discretionary? How much gasoline do we really need to survive? Steel and cement are largely a function of industrial growth, but they're also used to build houses and apartment buildings - to house more people...

They're interrelated in a causal way as well. Say it is true that 85% of the problem can be attributed to population, and we steer 85% of our resources that way (some kind of Logan's Run-type arrangement). Then prices drop with the corresponding drop in demand, and surprise - consumption skyrockets.

IMO both issues need to be addressed simultaneously - both need to be taxed universally and aggressively. You want to have that third child? OK - you're not only going to lose your tax break, you're going to pay a lot of money for that right. And consumption could be solved with 10 years by globally adopting fee-dividend (James Hansen's pet stratagem). Perfectly logical, extremely simple, the plan's biggest stumbling block is public acceptance and the willingness to look at new ideas. Even the criticisms presented by business (Wikipedia) show a complete misunderstanding of the concept.

[GliderGuider]

32. You hit the nail on the head there

...the plan's biggest stumbling block is public acceptance and the willingness to look at new ideas.

That's precisely why we're in such an enormous predicament. I've long maintained that the biggest barrier to action (even trivial actions like fee-and-dividend or windmills) is human psychology. When 6.8 out of 7 billion people don't want to do something, it doesn't happen.

While I still think that technological "solutions" are a chimera, the main reason I've pulled back from activism is because of what I've discovered about human psychology. We tend to act only at the point of crisis, not before. Pushing people to do things I know in advance they will refuse to do is not my idea of a good time.

[Redlo Nosrep]

26. So Sad

When I was blithely ignorant of how my yuppie activities in the Eighties were contributing to the current mess our oceans are in, I indulged in many a snorkeling trip to Caribbean reefs that remain some of my fondest memories.

Now I feel hugely responsible and would like to know from those of you with more scientific education than I have, if "electrochemical weathering" as a geo-engineering solution over the long term would cause a bigger problem than the acidification it purports to reverse:

http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/a-novel-strategy-to-counter-ocean-acidification.html

[wtmusic]

30. None of us knew

the full consequences of our actions in the 1980s. But guilt is only helpful now if it inspires us to action.

My biggest objection to any kind of sequestration scheme is that iimplementation will be expensive, difficult to verify, and thus prone to fraud. IMO we need to put the brakes on CO2, first and foremost.

Welcome to DU Redlo!

[GliderGuider]

31. Putting the brakes on CO2

Last edited Wed Oct 3, 2012, 10:13 AM - Edit history (1)

One of the thoughts that clarified as a result of my work yesterday is the realization that we won't be able to lower CO2 unless we lower the number of people. Tech solutions are somewhat useful, and certainly keep us occupied until dinner comes, but as long as there is a combination of people and fossil fuel on the planet CO2 emissions will continue to rise. FF are just too cheap, easy and enticing an energy source for us (the planetary "us" that is) to leave alone.

Once our population begins to decline the rate of increase of CO2 will begin to fall, but not before then. It's a hard conclusion to accept, but every piece of investigation I've done in the past decade, including my back-of-the-envelope noodle yesterday, has reinforced it.

[CRH]

33. Agree totally with your post, ...

only have a comment I've been thinking a lot about lately. I think for a significant reduction in CO2 levels will take a near decimation of the world population, or a significant crisis in the world economy to add chaos to the equation.

The largest part of any fall in population will be where poverty is rampant, and those are areas where CO2 production per capita is miniscule compared to first world. A three billion reduction in population in Asia and Africa might be a very small reduction in fossil fuel use and CO2 production. By that time I wonder of the concentrations in the atmosphere and the new climate it produces will be able to support civilized society with stability and order, or if the ultimate destiny of surviving humanity would be migratory hunter gather tribes.

[GliderGuider]

34. That's my take on it as well.

The poor will go first, as always. To a devoted believer in social justice this is one of the aspects of the whole thing that sucks the worst. I just can't see any way around it.