I hate it when researchers go out
and compare apples and oranges through implication but refuse to come out and
spell out the wrong conclusion they want you to accept because they know better.
If it were possible to extract
all the geological carbon available and to burn it quickly, it is likely that
we would end up been unhappy. It is not
possible and I will go further than that to say that we have now burned
approximately three quarters of all the carbon we are likely ever to
consume. After we shut in carbon
production we are just as likely to become concerned by the too low carbon
levels in the atmosphere and turn around to deliberately burn such fuels solely
to provide CO2.
The breakthroughs are on the
shelf today that outright ends the coal age
except for steel and cement and also ends the oil age almost completely
although we will operate at around a third capacity for a couple of generations.
Anthropogenic carbon consumption
is about to decline precipitously. It
will become very uncomfortable economically for a lot of folks, but that is
what is rushing toward us.
Oceans Acidifying Faster today Than in Past 300 Million Years
by Staff Writers
The common sea fan is but one of the species being affected by
acidifying oceans. Credit: NOAA.
The oceans may be acidifying faster today than they did in the last 300
million years, according to scientists publishing a paper this week in the
journal Science. "What we're doing today really stands out in the
geologic record," says lead author Barbel Honisch, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University
"We know that life during past ocean acidification events was not
wiped out--new species evolved to replace those that died off. But if
industrial carbon emissions continue at the current pace, we may lose organisms
we care about--coral reefs, oysters, salmon."
The oceans act like a sponge to draw down excess carbon dioxide from
the air.
The gas reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid, which over time
is neutralized by fossil carbonate shells on the seafloor.
If too much carbon dioxide enters the ocean too quickly, it can deplete
the carbonate ions that corals, mollusks and some plankton need for reef and
shell-building.
In a review of hundreds of paleoceanographic studies,
the researchers found evidence for only one period in the last 300 million
years when the oceans changed as fast as today: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal
Maximum, or PETM.
In ocean sediment cores, the PETM appears as a brown mud layer flanked
by thick deposits of white plankton fossils.
About 56 million years ago, a mysterious surge of carbon into the
atmosphere warmed the planet and turned the oceans corrosive.
In about 5,000 years, atmospheric carbon doubled to 1,800 parts per
million (ppm), and average global temperatures rose by about 6 degrees Celsius.
[This is by the way a way over
the top injection of carbon and certainly has a volcanogenic origin. It is several times higher than present
levels, which is obviously around a third of the prevailing levels when this event
began. Until the industrial revolution,
we lived in a world in which carbon levels were severely depleted as compared
to the past in the geological record. - Arclein]
The carbonate plankton shells littering the seafloor dissolved, leaving
the brown clay layer that scientists see in sediment cores today.
As many as half of all species of benthic foraminifera, a group of
one-celled organisms that live at the ocean bottom, went extinct, suggesting
that deep-sea organisms higher on the food chain may have also disappeared,
said paper co-author Ellen Thomas, a paleoceanographer at Yale University.
"It's really unusual that you lose more than 5 to 10 percent of
species," she said.
Scientists estimate that ocean acidity--its
pH--may have fallen as much as 0.45 units as the planet vented stores of carbon
into the air.
"These scientists have synthesized and evaluated evidence far back
in Earth's history," said Candace Major, program officer in the National
Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the
research.
"The ocean acidification we're
seeing today is unprecedented," said Major, "even when viewed through
the lens of the past 300 million years, a result of the very fast rates at which
we're changing the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans."
In the last hundred years, rising carbon dioxide from human activities
has lowered ocean pH by 0.1 unit, an acidification rate at least 10 times
faster than 56 million years ago, says Honisch.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
predicts that pH will fall another 0.2 units by 2100, raising the possibility
that we may soon see ocean changes similar to those observed during the PETM.
More catastrophic events have happened on Earth before, but perhaps not
as quickly.
The study finds two other analogs for modern day ocean
acidification--the extinctions triggered by massive volcanism at the end of the
Permian and Triassic eras, about 252 million and 201 million years ago,
respectively.
But the authors caution that because ocean sediments older than 180
million years have been recycled back into the deep Earth, scientists have
fewer records to work with.
During the "Great Dying" at the end of the Permian, about 252
million years ago, about 96 percent of life disappeared.
Massive eruptions from what is known as the Siberian Traps in
present-day Russia
Over 20,000 years or more, carbon in the atmosphere rose dramatically.
Scientists have found evidence for ocean dead zones, and preferential
survival of organisms predisposed to carbonate-poor seawater and high
blood-carbon levels, but so far they have been unable to reconstruct changes in
ocean pH or carbonate.
At the end of the Triassic, about 201 million years ago, a second burst
of mass volcanism associated with the break-up of the supercontinent Pangaea
doubled atmospheric carbon and touched off another wave of die-offs.
Coral reefs collapsed and an entire class of sea creatures, the
eel-like conodonts, vanished.
On land, large plant-eating animals gave rise to meat-eating dinosaurs
like Tyrannosaurus rex as the Jurassic era began.
A greater extinction of tropical species has led some scientists to
question whether global warming rather than ocean acidification was the main
killer at this time.
This study finds that the most notorious of all extinctions, the one
that ended the Age of Dinosaurs with a falling asteroid 65 million years ago,
may not have been associated with ocean acidification.
The asteroid impact in present-day Mexico
Though many species of plankton went extinct, coral reefs and benthic
foraminifera survived.
In lab experiments, scientists have tried to simulate modern ocean
acidification, but the number of variables currently at play--high carbon
dioxide and warmer temperatures, and reduced ocean pH and dissolved oxygen
levels--make predictions difficult.
An alternative to investigating the paleo-record has been to study
natural carbon seeps from offshore volcanoes that are producing the
acidification levels expected by the year 2100.
In a recent study of coral reefs off Papua New Guinea, scientists found
that during long-term exposure to high carbon dioxide and pH 0.2 units lower
than today--at a pH of 7.8 (the IPCC projection for 2100)--reef biodiversity
and regeneration
NSF Discovery Article: Trouble in
Paradise: Ocean Acidification This Way Comes.
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