scalarparty ([info]scalarparty) wrote,
@ 2006-07-30 16:22:00
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Entry tags:carbon scrubbing, climate change, think, water

Ocean PH levels are 30% higher than ever* before
lso
please read this article by Martin Mittelstaedt of the Globe/Mail. Many have been discussing it, Forbes has talked about it, even Fox News mentioned it, but this is a great explanation. And it;s a serious issue, based on this report that came out earlier this month from Joan Kleypas and her krewe at Boulder's NCAR.

Basically 1/2 of the CO2 we've 'allegedly' been pumping in to the atmosphere has been winding up in the oceans. which is good cause it slowed down global warming (imagine if there was twice as much CO2 there already) but the HORRIBLE thing about it is that it is turning our oceans into acid. And faster than has probably ever happened before on the planet. There is already a 30% higher PH level in the oceans, than there has been since the industrial revolution (actually 30% higher than its beein in over 600,000 years). And that's bad news for shellfish, as the acid eats their shells, and also deadly bad news to the coral reefs (as if they already weren't having enough problems) and of course, that is bad news for over 25% of the Oceans species who live at least part of their lives in the corals... ok and bad news for every animal who eat that 25% once they leave the reefs...

its the opposite of the old high school experiment where one would take some vinegar (acid) and some cacium (baking soda) and it would produce bubbling CO2... here you take the air's CO2 and the Shellfish's calcium and get acid. And it ain't pretty.... What do we do to stop this?


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[info]7leaguebootdisk
2006-07-30 09:08 pm UTC (link)
Well, we can dump iron rust in areas of the seas that have the other food they need, the resulting plankton bloom turns co2 into plankton skelitons, which then sink to the bottom of the ocean. On a small scale this works, in a large scale it is hoped that it would be self sustaining (and thus you would not need to keep dumping large quantities of iron).

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[info]scalarparty
2006-07-30 10:51 pm UTC (link)
yeah i was thinking about that iron/algae thing... i used to be wary of the idea of dropping shiploads of iron into the seas, and am sure we still have to into all the implications, but it's sounding better and better every day..

you know, it's a scary slope. climate modification, geoengineering the oceans, all that, but we've kinda been doing it for some time now, inadvertently, and so perhaps the only way forward is to continue doing it but with a more wholistic perspective? like bruce stirling says; iit's not natural, it will never be natural again, but its doable...

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[info]7leaguebootdisk
2006-07-31 03:35 am UTC (link)
We are modifing the world one way or another. May as well be thoughtful about it.

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[info]billietuhes
2008-07-17 08:44 am UTC (link)
Those cars need minerals, they need steel, they need iron ore mining, they need aluminum, they need bauxite mining.

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[info]solarsaddle
2006-07-31 01:18 pm UTC (link)
Don't mean to be a nitpicker but 30% higher? The pH scale is a bit counterintuitive because acidic solutions have low pH while alkaline ones have high values (between zero and 14). CO2 dissolves in water to give an acidic solution. So I suspect that you mean that the pH is lower. And given that pH is a logarithmic scale it's not clear what the 30% actually means.
There is no doubt, however, that the pH is falling - that has been documented for a number of years - and this has serious consequences for organisms that do carbonate chemistry, like corals, plankton etc since the more acidic the water gets, paradoxically, the more difficult it is to precipitate carbonate.

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thanks!
[info]scalarparty
2006-07-31 01:22 pm UTC (link)
nitpick away, and thanks! i stand corrected... i was wondering why they kept on saying 30% more acidic and never saying PH in the same breath... i'll haveto correct this this afternooon. Thanks again!

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(Reply from suspended user)
better combustion with less pollution thanks to magnets ?
(Anonymous)
2006-08-04 07:31 am UTC (link)
i tend to believe that there is some truth in this ... i really hope it is working

http://www.hugg.com/story/China-To-Fight-Air-Pollution-With-Magnets-1/


what you think ?


less pollutioned air means less pollution in the oceans

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