Carbon Dioxide Levels Increase Ocean Acidity

Cross-posted at dailykos.com

According to Britain’s leading scientific organization, the Royal Society, carbon dioxide is making the world’s oceans increasingly acidic. The Royal Society has released 60 page report to coincide with the Group 8 economic meeting this week. The group’s current president, Prime Minister Tony Blair, has called for action to slow climate change.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/01/international/europe/01ocean.html
The effects of the increase can be measured now.

Unlike forecasts of global warming, which are based on complex and incomplete computer models, the chemistry of carbon dioxide and seawater is simple and straightforward.

The burning of fossil fuels by cars and power plants releases more than 25 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year. Roughly a third of that is absorbed by the oceans,
where the gas undergoes chemical reactions that produce carbonic acid, which is corrosive to shells.

Substantial change has already taken place in the last two hundred years.

Ocean water today is somewhat alkaline, at 8.1, about 0.1 lower than at the start of the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago.

But like the magnitude scale of earthquakes, one unit on the pH scale reflects a change of a factor of 10. The 0.1 pH change means there are now 30 percent more hydrogen ions in the water.

Depending on the rate of fossil fuel burning, the pH of ocean water near the surface is expected to drop to 7.7 to 7.9 by 2100, lower than any time in the last 420,000 years, the Royal Society report said.

While there have been times in the distant past where carbon dioxide levels have been high, the concern is that the current change is taking place too fast. That is, a slower increase would allow the oceans to
dilute the additional carbon dioxide.

Dr. Ken Caldeira, a research scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, Calif., and a member of the Royal Society panel:

“If we put it out over a few hundred thousand years, we’d have nothing to worry about,” he said.

Coral reefs, already facing the problem of temperature change, will likely suffer further.

The pH change is likely to slow the rate of growth of coral reefs, which are already suffering from warmer temperatures and pollution, the report said.

5 Comments

boran2 on July 5, 2005 at 3:08 pm

Thanks for reading.

duranta on July 5, 2005 at 5:54 pm

We know global warming is happening. Now I would like to know, how much of the greenhouses gasses we are putting into the atmosphere, how much do we need to reduce, and how fast, to reverse the trend.

Then, having answered that question, we need to know concrete answers as to what we can do to reverse this trend: what is it going to take. Let’s start putting the answers on this site and others.

boran2 on July 5, 2005 at 10:36 pm

There is so much disagreement on these issues that we must do whatever can. Signing on to Kyoto would have been helpful since we are the world’s largest consumer of energy. It will be interesting to see if anything arises from the current meetings in Europe.
ColoRambler on July 5, 2005 at 10:52 pm
Can’t say everyone could do this,but:
- One car for four family members — even in a city that’s not very dense, and has iffy public transit.
- Whenever possible, use foot power (walk, ride a bicycle, etc.)
- Whenever possible, reduce electricity usage (we have A/C, but for moderately hot days, we run whole house fans and keep the sun out).
- Buy locally.
- Make your own stuff (we do this just a little bit, with a garden, but it’s something we’d like to do more of)
- Consume less — save up for real quality so you aren’t replacing cheap crap — increasingly, cheap imported crap that uses lots of fuel to transport.
In the long run, as a country, we have the technology now to do things like:
- rely more on rail travel (especially for stuff that would otherwise go by truck)
- build better hybrid cars
- build diesel-electric hybrid cars. Ever get tired of the “diesel vs. hybrid” debate on an energy blog? Me too. Easy answer–do both!
- rely more on renewable energy — wind and solar get cheaper every year, thanks to better technology.
asdf on July 6, 2005 at 12:21 am
You have hit on the basic problem, and have perhaps noticed that there’s not much discussion of it. That’s because the situation is already so bad that if you think about it very much, it scares your pants off.

Serious scientific study has shown that we’ve already screwed up the planet, and that continued warming is inevitable EVEN IF WE STOP BURNING FOSSIL FUEL COMPLETELY RIGHT NOW.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7225653/

The atmosphere/ocean system has a lot of inertia, and would continue to drift in the wrong direction for quite a while–400 years–even if we completely stopped adding CO2 right away.

That is the basic problem that makes the whole discussion so tough: Politicians are trying to make points by arguing about the Kyoto treaty and things that we might do by 2020 to reduce our CO2 output by X percent, but actually what we need to do to “solve the problem” is such a radical change that it’s basically impossible. Even the most crazy radical commie nutcase leftist greens are just proposing to re-arrange the deck chairs.

To get the CO2 level back to preindustrial levels we would need to:
- Immediately shut off our coal fired electricity plants.
- Replace them all with nuclear plants.
- Stop all fossil fueled transportation. (I.e. all transportation.)
- Convert all heating systems to solar and electric.
- Tell China and south asia to forget about industrialization.
- Build massive as-yet-undesigned CO2 sequestration systems.
- Start building the seawalls needed to protect coastal areas for the next 400 years–at least. (400 years is just the warming up time, then there’s another couple of centuries of cooling down time to account for…)
- Get tropical disease preparation going for northern latitudes.
- Etc.
What politician is going to sign up for that sort of stuff? None. But they sure can make points pointing fingers at each other.

boran2 on July 5, 2005 at 3:08 pm

Thanks for reading.
duranta on July 5, 2005 at 5:54 pm

We know global warming is happening. Now I would like to know, how much of the greenhouses gasses we are putting into the atmosphere, how much do we need to reduce, and how fast, to reverse the trend.

Then, having answered that question, we need to know concrete answers as to what we can do to reverse this trend: what is it going to take. Let’s start putting the answers on this site and others.
- boran2 on July 5, 2005 at 10:36 pm
  
  There is so much disagreement on these issues that we must do whatever can. Signing on to Kyoto would have been helpful since we are the world’s largest consumer of energy. It will be interesting to see if anything arises from the current meetings in Europe.
- ColoRambler on July 5, 2005 at 10:52 pm
  Can’t say everyone could do this,but:
  
  One car for four family members — even in a city that’s not very dense, and has iffy public transit.
  
  Whenever possible, use foot power (walk, ride a bicycle, etc.)
  
  Whenever possible, reduce electricity usage (we have A/C, but for moderately hot days, we run whole house fans and keep the sun out).
  
  Buy locally.
  
  Make your own stuff (we do this just a little bit, with a garden, but it’s something we’d like to do more of)
  
  Consume less — save up for real quality so you aren’t replacing cheap crap — increasingly, cheap imported crap that uses lots of fuel to transport.
  
  In the long run, as a country, we have the technology now to do things like:
  
  rely more on rail travel (especially for stuff that would otherwise go by truck)
  
  build better hybrid cars
  
  build diesel-electric hybrid cars. Ever get tired of the “diesel vs. hybrid” debate on an energy blog? Me too. Easy answer–do both!
  
  rely more on renewable energy — wind and solar get cheaper every year, thanks to better technology.
- asdf on July 6, 2005 at 12:21 am
  You have hit on the basic problem, and have perhaps noticed that there’s not much discussion of it. That’s because the situation is already so bad that if you think about it very much, it scares your pants off.
  
  Serious scientific study has shown that we’ve already screwed up the planet, and that continued warming is inevitable EVEN IF WE STOP BURNING FOSSIL FUEL COMPLETELY RIGHT NOW.
  http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7225653/
  
  The atmosphere/ocean system has a lot of inertia, and would continue to drift in the wrong direction for quite a while–400 years–even if we completely stopped adding CO2 right away.
  
  That is the basic problem that makes the whole discussion so tough: Politicians are trying to make points by arguing about the Kyoto treaty and things that we might do by 2020 to reduce our CO2 output by X percent, but actually what we need to do to “solve the problem” is such a radical change that it’s basically impossible. Even the most crazy radical commie nutcase leftist greens are just proposing to re-arrange the deck chairs.
  
  To get the CO2 level back to preindustrial levels we would need to:
  
  Immediately shut off our coal fired electricity plants.
  
  Replace them all with nuclear plants.
  
  Stop all fossil fueled transportation. (I.e. all transportation.)
  
  Convert all heating systems to solar and electric.
  
  Tell China and south asia to forget about industrialization.
  
  Build massive as-yet-undesigned CO2 sequestration systems.
  
  Start building the seawalls needed to protect coastal areas for the next 400 years–at least. (400 years is just the warming up time, then there’s another couple of centuries of cooling down time to account for…)
  
  Get tropical disease preparation going for northern latitudes.
  
  Etc.
  
  What politician is going to sign up for that sort of stuff? None. But they sure can make points pointing fingers at each other.

Carbon Dioxide Levels Increase Ocean Acidity

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