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Ocean acidification due to carbon emissions is at highest for 300m years

theguardian.com

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Re: Ocean acidification due to carbon emissions is at highest for 300m years

#111

Post by 7952 »

nrmilstein wrote: post #110
SCAQTony wrote: post #94

Let's presume it is all true. Gizmag quoted a study that 15-container ships (just 15) dole out the same amount of pollution as 760-million cars. (I shit you not): http://www.gizmag.com/shipping-pollution/11526/ God knows what coal and power plants produce but nonetheless, why does the IPSO and The Guardian have to scare the shit out of everyone instead of offering some sort of real, solution? If this is all true and…

Not all journalism or scientific reporting is about presenting solutions, and pointing out the problems (especially of this severity, if the article is to be believed) is an important step. Furthermore, as the article says, I don't think anyone knows the solution. Even if we drastically reduce carbon emissions, it probably won't help. I often find an attitude of dismissal and disdain towards environmental reporting l…

I agree with the criticism of HN. The lack of understanding of basic geography and the environment is shocking. Its like listening to a bunch of non-technical sales people discuss computer security.

Re: Ocean acidification due to carbon emissions is at highest for 300m years

#112

Post by waps »

saalweachter wrote: post #108
waps wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with him : your belief that it's possible for humans to keep our environment constant over significant time frames is what's ridiculous. You're turning around the argument. He's not suggesting anything insane, you are. You're defending Disney reality (poor little animals ! We must help !) against the idea of evolution (adapt or die ? Can't adapt by the thousands ? Too bad). Guess which one is going to win in…

What do you consider "significant time frames"? 10 years, 1000 years, 100,000? If human activity is destabilizing the environment (ie, we have burned an amount of carbon which is suspiciously congruent with the amount of excess carbon in the atmosphere/oceans) why is it unreasonable to expect human activities to provide a similar amount of stabilization, even if greater amounts exceed our grasp?

Everything in nature happens along exponential growth curves, so those years are meaningless. This means that not much appears to happen for long periods (few 100k years at most though), then suddenly exponential growth changes everything. As soon as the growth factor increases I would expect to see massive, unpredictable changes 5-10 generation lengths later, assuming a growth factor of 2.

> why is it unreasonable to expect human activities to provide a similar amount of stabilization, even if greater amounts exceed our grasp?

Because of thermodynamics. Given that you start from a system that is not in thermodynamic equilibrium (the earth is not, nor would it be desirable if it was), large sudden changes are par for the course, not an exception.

There is disagreement on whether it is even possible to halt the changes. You can certainly make the change turn out differently (does not mean better, just different). Thermodynamics takes it as an assumption that it is not (you cannot stabilize (ie. "cool") a gas by adding energy, no matter how large the amount, you can only let it expand into a larger area or bring it into contact with something much more stable than it is, and you'll destabilize the large thing in the process).

The causal problem here (in mathematical terms) is that while it is certainly true that "X" caused change "Y", and that Y is large, the absence of "X" would have lead to an equally large change "Z". Take for example the "3-body" phenomenon : Take the solar system. Move one 1kg rock in the asteroid belt (or almost anywhere else) 1 meter in any direction. Wait 10000 years. Look at the effect it had. Counterintuitively, planetary orbits will differ significantly as a result of that tiny movement. It won't take long for that rock to affect the paths of rocks near it through gravity. The change will grow, and before you know it it significantly affects the paths of the thousands of huge "temporary comets" that get catapulted out of the asteroid belt on a regular basis. A few of those will come close to a moon, and "slingshot" around them, significantly affecting the orbit of said moon, which will affect the path of the planet it's orbiting. Any small difference in orbit will build up over time into the positions and orbits of those planets and before you know it, nothing looks alike anymore.

Re: Ocean acidification due to carbon emissions is at highest for 300m years

#113

Post by krasin »

prewett wrote: post #82
berntb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you live, but the Swedish Green party still want to immediately start phasing out nuclear power. More CO2 for the world. (If the seas do have an ecological crash which makes the remaining eco systems go down, then any surviving Green party members will probably argue the advantage of this, pushing their carts down "The Road".) So, no hope. :-) :-(

I don't see nuclear power as a great solution. The waste contaminates the environment for thousands of years. And the system is not fault-tolerant, failing in ways which render the environment uninhabitable for who knows how long (Chernobyl, Fukushima). Yeah, it doesn't generate CO2. But at least you can live in a hotter world, can't live with nuclear waste/fallout. (Also, we don't know that a hotter climate is bad,…

Chernobyl is habitable. It's a bit of a land mine, as there're some places with extremely high radiation, but on average it's fine. Wild life feel very good there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disast...

To make Chernobyl comfortable for people, a cleaning effort is needed, but it's of manageable size.

Re: Ocean acidification due to carbon emissions is at highest for 300m years

#114

Post by venomsnake »

noonespecial wrote: post #80
Aloisius wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well ocean acidification is real and proven. At this point all we're arguing about is how many years we have left.

This is certainly true, but amount matters. If its 300 years then we have a problem, if its 3000, maybe not so much. Articles like this do not help give perspective.

Not at all ... if the acidification is moving some positive feedback loops (and it seems it is) we have much less.

Re: Ocean acidification due to carbon emissions is at highest for 300m years

#116

Post by Ygg2 »

nrmilstein wrote: post #110
SCAQTony wrote: post #94

Let's presume it is all true. Gizmag quoted a study that 15-container ships (just 15) dole out the same amount of pollution as 760-million cars. (I shit you not): http://www.gizmag.com/shipping-pollution/11526/ God knows what coal and power plants produce but nonetheless, why does the IPSO and The Guardian have to scare the shit out of everyone instead of offering some sort of real, solution? If this is all true and…

Not all journalism or scientific reporting is about presenting solutions, and pointing out the problems (especially of this severity, if the article is to be believed) is an important step. Furthermore, as the article says, I don't think anyone knows the solution. Even if we drastically reduce carbon emissions, it probably won't help. I often find an attitude of dismissal and disdain towards environmental reporting l…

    >  But the stark reality, if the science is to be 
    >  believed, is that we're on the path towards major 
    >  environmental changes in the foreseeable future, and as of 
    >  right now, we don't have a solution.
I'd disagree we're on the path. We are threading deep into woods that path leads (Hello poisonous jellifishes!).

I'm not sure we can turn, back, but if by some miracle scientists are all wrong, and we aren't doomed in the near future, we still need to be extremely careful of our impact on ecosystems.

Re: Ocean acidification due to carbon emissions is at highest for 300m years

#117

Post by anon1385 »

aaron695 wrote: post #78
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #46

How credible a source is IPSO, the author of the report backing this story? From what I can tell it's a U.K. non-profit hosted by the Zoological Society of London [1], itself a U.K. non-profit [2]. Alex Rogers, IPSO's Scientific Director [1], is also a Professor in Conservation Biology at the University of Oxford [3]. Paper article is based on: http://www.stateoftheocean.org/pdfs/Bijma-et-al-2013.pdf [1] http://en.wi…

Fake science for the masses Older article on the issue - "The coming centuries may see more ocean acidification than the past 300 million years." https://pangea.stanford.edu/research/Oceans/GES205/Caldeira_... It seems to me, 300 million is used a lot since it's the period scientists can measure? Probably it's gotten caught up in some sort of quote that we are heading to a time where it's higher than 300 million. It…

What is 'fake' or 'dodgy' about the article? You haven't actually specified what problems you have with it.

Acidification, pollution and overfishing are all related if you care about ocean biodiversity or about the economic impacts of the collapse of fisheries.

A much more recent article than your 10 year old one: http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/Honisch_et_al_2012_Science_oc...

Ocean acidification may have severe consequences for marine ecosystems; however, assessing its future impact is difficult because laboratory experiments and field observations are limited by their reduced ecologic complexity and sample period, respectively. In contrast, the geological record contains long-term evidence for a variety of global environmental perturbations, including ocean acidification plus their associated biotic responses. We review events exhibiting evidence for elevated atmospheric CO2, global warming, and ocean acidification over the past ~300 million years of Earth’s history, some with contemporaneous extinction or evolutionary turnover among marine calcifiers. Although similarities exist, no past event perfectly parallels future projections in terms of disrupting the balance of ocean carbonate chemistry—a consequence of the unprecedented rapidity of CO2 release currently taking place.

Re: Ocean acidification due to carbon emissions is at highest for 300m years

#118

Post by waps »

Demiurge wrote: post #107
waps wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basic thermodynamics can provide a lower limit : at least 9x more energy than was gained by burning it (except for oil burned in power plants, where it'd be 6-7x, but that's not much). That seems to mean that without massive expansions in nuclear power it's just not in the cards.

But like with nuclear power, we don't have to do all the work. We don't need to generate electricity and then run conventional a CO2 filter. Hypothetically, if we dump 1 trillion dollars into genetic engineering, why can't we design some biological chain reaction that would do all the work?

Actually I sort of like the medieval approach : government prizes. We want this done, why not create a competition ? If a company can solve this problem, document how you've done it (AFTER the fact) and present it to a board of government scientists. If they believe you, you get the prize money.

And make the prize money something like $5 billion or so. Chump change for what you're asking for. Besides, it has to be an amount that would provide decades of comfort for a company of at least a dozen people + a nice reward for any investors.

This worked for draining swamps in the late middle ages. It worked for building things like clocks and compasses, and these sorts of prizes is how ocean-capable ships were designed in the first place. I would argue that the (early) prizes were for 'allow a ship to navigate without any visible markers on the ground', about as nebulous a concept as 'lower atmospheric co2 by 50% - or at least prove you can do it' would be.

Re: Ocean acidification due to carbon emissions is at highest for 300m years

#119

Post by ars »

venomsnake wrote: post #114
noonespecial wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is certainly true, but amount matters. If its 300 years then we have a problem, if its 3000, maybe not so much. Articles like this do not help give perspective.

Not at all ... if the acidification is moving some positive feedback loops (and it seems it is) we have much less.

There are almost no positive feedback loops in nature, for the simple reason that they tend to get triggered by random variations and feedback on themself till they reach limit and convert to negative loops.

Re: Ocean acidification due to carbon emissions is at highest for 300m years

#120

Post by Demiurge »

waps wrote: post #118
Demiurge wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But like with nuclear power, we don't have to do all the work. We don't need to generate electricity and then run conventional a CO2 filter. Hypothetically, if we dump 1 trillion dollars into genetic engineering, why can't we design some biological chain reaction that would do all the work?

Actually I sort of like the medieval approach : government prizes. We want this done, why not create a competition ? If a company can solve this problem, document how you've done it (AFTER the fact) and present it to a board of government scientists. If they believe you, you get the prize money. And make the prize money something like $5 billion or so. Chump change for what you're asking for. Besides, it has to be an…

I agree, that's probably more sensible than organizing another conglomerate. The question is, why hasn't this been done?
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