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Carnegie Researchers Say Geotech Can't Cure Ocean Acidification
CarnegieScience writes "Plans to stop global warming by 'geoengineering' the planet by putting aerosols in the atmosphere to block sunlight are controversial, to say the least. Scientists are now pointing out that even if it keeps the planet cool, it will do almost nothing to stop another major problem — ocean acidification. The ocean will keep on absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (making carbonic acid) and the water's pH will get too low for corals and other marine life to secrete skeletons. So this is another strike against a quick fix of our climate problems."
Do these climate models take into account the fact that Volcanoes erupt from time to time, spewings tons of ash into the atmosphere, which reflects sunlight, and thereby cools the earth?
Yes. And it's not the ash that primarily reflects the sunlight; it's the SOx. And the cooling is only temporary. And volcanoes also emit CO2. But a small fraction as much as humans release.
And yes, volcanic ash is acidic.
Present day. Present time.
According to my layman's understanding of climate change theory, the energy comes from the sun. What your car is doing is emitting CO2 which builds up in the atmosphere. Because of the extra buildup of CO2 and other so-called "greenhouse gases" the energy that would normally leave the earth into space does so at a much slower pace, thus the average temperature of the earth is slowly increasing.
For more information: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=global+warming
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
Hey, why not go back and re-examine your textbooks from high school chemistry? It seems you slept through the second part of that lecture.
Remember the lab where you had to determine the concentration of a buffer in solution that had pH-sensitive dyes in it?
And how you could pipette huge amounts of an acid (or base) into the solution without a notable change in pH? But then you add one more drop and *presto* your solution was now purple (or orange, etc)? And with each drop added after that, there was no buffering effect?
Buffer systems in the ocean are like that, though more complex.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
eutrophication seems to be a much more worrisome human-created force than rising CO2 levels, at least when it comes to the health of ocean ecosystems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutrophication
but since its been known about for awhile, you can't generate headlines and hysteria and funding with dire predictions. the effects are real and sobering with eutrophication, and deserve far more study and mitigation than the notion of rising CO2 levels in the oceans on the timescales involved, that's for sure
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As I understand it, methane is a bigger problem them CO2
You understand wrong. It is a large problem, but CO2 is larger by over threefold.
They tell us to not fart anymore.
Who, your roomate? Certainly not the scientific community. Most animal-based methane emissions come from ruminants. And not from "farting", but "belching" (the initial breakdown occurs in the rumen, and the bolus moves back and forth between the mouth and the rumen). "Farting" isn't even the second leading cause of ruminant methane emissions -- that goes to manure decomposition.
Livestock-sourced methane is only one significant anthropogenic component. Others include rice agriculture, peatland/wetlands development, the oil and gas industry, landfills, and biomass burning. Other significant human-sourced methane emissions, including ruminant raising, are nearly double those of natural emissions. Ruminants may be the largest single anthropogenic component, but they're less than a sixth of total human-sourced methane emissions.
And yet, when those monster Apatosaurus, including the popular, but obsolete synonym Brontosaurus roamed the earth. I dare say one herd/tribe/pod produced a much methane as all the cattle that currently populate the earth.
Little is known that could lead one to draw any conclusions about the large sauropods in terms of methane emissions. They weren't ruminants, although they did eat large quantities of plant matter. We don't know their herd size, and haven't even conclusively shown that herding behavior was significant for them. And more importantly, we don't know their total worldwide population. However, as large herbivores, one thing can be certain: they didn't have a particularly high global population density. It just wouldn't support them.
There are approximately 1 trillion cattle worldwide. This is just cattle -- not counting other ruminants. These average about 1.5 tons at adulthood. An adult apatosaurus is estimated to weigh about 30 tons. If we assume a weight equivalence, that's the equivalent of 50 billion apatosaurus. It is extremely unlikely that there were that many apatosaurus -- or even total sauropods. We support this much cattle mass cattle via modern intensive agriculture and research.
Furthermore, your notion is based on a premise -- that either the atmosphere is static or it's always changing harmlessly. But that's not the reality. The atmosphere has changed dramatically over history. Generally these changes are very slow; that's not a problem. It's when changes are rapid that there are problems. The last atmospheric change similar to what we're forcing nowadays was the PETM (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum). The causes are still unknown, but one thing is known: over the course of hundreds or thousands of years (the blink of an eye by geologic standards), there was a CO2 and heat spike. This triggered a methane spike, which amplified the heat spike. The total warming input was approximately what we'll have locked in to if we continue the "business as usual" scenario through 2100. The results were dramatic and catastrophic. Entire ocean currents shifted. The climates of regions across the planet dramatically altered. Forests became plains became deserts became forests. The ocean became acidic, and most of the world's corals and carbonate-shelled plankton died, causing a massive upheaval in the oceanic food chains. The planet was left such a changed place that we give it a different name -- the Eocene.
Now, my question to you is this: do you really want to create the Anthropocene?
Present day. Present time.
Dumping fertilizer into the sea would also work to absorb CO2 by promoting the growth of sea plant life.
Which leads to algal blooms, which prevent sunlight from reaching submerged aquatic vegetation, which leads to plant die-off which leads to lack of oxygen production, which leads to fish kills. Look up submerged aquatic vegetation (SAVs) in the chesapeake bay for examples of this happening (and excessive oyster dredging).
Where do we go from here?
No, that's an Ad Hominem. The important thing to ask is, "Is the research scientifically sound?"
You're right, my reply was kind of ad hominem-ish.
But I think the notion of ad hominem is overly simplistic. I agree that the correctness of an argument is generally independent of who advances it. But most of us have limited time to consider a given issue, and we need to use our best judgment to decide whose arguments to consider, simply due to time constraints.
When given two arguments, one presented by a research team from a respected univeristy, and another from a guy who admits that he might be mis-remembering his high school chemistry, I'm going to invest much more time in the latter, because it's more likely to be a good use of my time.
if you sound the alarm bell, you get press and you get funding.
Just the opposite. Any scientist willing to deny global warming has an automatic lucrative job lined up for them in the oil, gas, and coal industries. Period. And extensive press coverage to boot. There are about two dozen (out of the world's several thousand professional climatologists) who deny global warming. They get almost as much coverage as the rest of them combined.
You don't make a name for yourself in the scientific community by simply repeating what others have said; you make a name for yourself by saying the opposite. And frankly, I'm sick and tired of every scientist in the world being accused of caring more about grants than funding, and the notion that the world's peer-review processes are a giant conspiracy.
i believe global warming is a real force and we need to do something about it. but i'm hard pressed to worry about corals disappearing in an acid ocean on any time scale that is supposed to mean something
Read about the PETM. It's happened before. We're doing it again.
And again, it doesn't matter what you *believe*; it matters what peer-reviewed science says. It's not a matter of belief. It's a matter of empirical data. We have models, field data, lab data, and historical data all saying the exact same thing about ocean acidification. You can deny it until you're blue in the face, but that won't change the facts.
Present day. Present time.
Why can't my car use it?
Not a dumb question at all! :) You brought up one of the biggest misunderstandings of physics that is the basis for innumerable perpetual motion/free energy scams: the concept of heat as energy.
Yes, heat *is* energy. But you can't harvest it directly; you can only harvest heat from differences in temperature. Why? Entropy. A hot material is more "disordered" than a cold material. Hence, you harvest energy from heat alone, sure, you wouldn't be violating enthalpy, but you would be violating entropy. Entropy must always increase. Now, if you have a hot reservoir and a cold reservoir, you can harvest some energy from heat, so long as you increase the entropy of the cold reservoir more than the hot reservoir lost.
If this law of the universe didn't exist, perpetual motion would be possible. Picture a closed system where you have a "heat harvester" that produces electricity without a cold reservoir, surrounded by a working fluid. It then runs some electrical appliance. The waste heat from the electrical appliance goes back into the working fluid, where it's harnessed again to make more electricity by the "heat harvester". Ad infinitum. Perpetual motion. And entropy forbids it.
Present day. Present time.