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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."
I'm still using my will to suppress your evidence that global warming is a problem.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
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Why don't they use something to up the alkalinity of the ocean, like, crushed coral? Oh, wait...
Geo-engineering may make people think that we can carry on as now with no sacrifices. This article tries to re-inject a sense of fear. Its like saying "OK so the vacuum cleaner is good at cleaning the floor. But does it paint the garage? No? Well back to cleaning the floor with a mop then"
Surely we deserve a more rational debate? Sacrifices are needed but sophistry will not persuade anyone.
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the ocean is a sort of buffer solution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_solution
what is major component of this buffer? us. living critters and how they react to an increase in CO2
http://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/SeaWiFS/TEACHERS/CHEMISTRY/
which means the oceans will maintain their pH over a wide range of abuse and this notion of ocean acidification is hysteria
You're probably right. I'm sure what you remember from high school is a good reason to dismiss the Carnegie Melon research team's results.
Good thing you thought of that - you should probably send them an email right away! You discovered the missing forcing that will keep our planet cool and our oceans pH balanced! Turns out that in all this freaking out about climate change, nobody who was even somewhat competent got involved at all.
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.
... a few hundred billion metric tons of calcium hydroxide would be a really nice thing to have right about now.
http://image52.webshots.com/152/1/14/3/518111403JQgFmi_ph.jpg
random trolls on slashdot always trump learned academics ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't see anyone, even the ones hollering about global warming, ceasing transportation activities that involve burning stuff and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
Well, the ones that DO get dismissed as dirty hippies, and then you stop looking at them.
Ok, the whole solution of Geo-engineering is a WTF moment.
We did not understand the global bio-sphere to begin with so we are in the Global-Environment change state. Now we propose attacking the symptoms without a full understanding of the dynamics.
It is like we have are playing russian roulette here and we don't know how many chambers are loaded.
Look at most attempts to "fix" environmental problems by introducing others. The bio-sphere is just way more interconnected than we can account for.
The best solution is to reduce our foot-print as rapidly as we can. And make sure it stays that way.
The amount of material eject by volcanoes is minuscule compared to what we put in the air, year after year.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Prior to the agricultural revolution asteriods were the leading cause of mass extinction.
Humans! The leader in every field of industry!
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what is major component of this buffer? us. living critters and how they react to an increase in CO2
Wow! Amazing that all of those egghead boffins living in their ivory towers with their hoity-toity "science" missed that one! Thank you so much for pointing it out!
Except for the fact that most ocean life is not primarily constrained by CO2, but nutrients, especially iron. Whoops.
I never ceased to be amazed at people who insist that something must be wrong with the science on a subject when they haven't done even the most rudimentary amount to educate themselves on what the science of the subject actually is. You could at least start by reading the relevant sections of the IPCC technical reports to see what actually has been studied and how. I guarantee you, it's way, way more than you ever expected.
There's a reason why people go to college for years to get a degree in these fields. This isn't high school baking-soda-and-vinegar-volcanoes here. It's an incredibly complex science that you need a solid background in. At least spend a week reading peer-reviewed papers on the subject before you put fingers to keyboard. You're coming across like if someone who had never used a computer started talking about how programmers should make every piece of software be run by voice commands in spoken English sentences like "Could you open up the letter to my grandmother and edit out the part where I told her about my chihuahua?", and have the software figure out what you want it to do. You're broadcasting ignorance on the topic like a beacon.
Present day. Present time.
We could dump a bunch of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) into the ocean. It'll neutralize the acid and release... carbon dioxide. Crap! We're doomed.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
Aerosols at best delay the rising temperatures. Perhaps we can come up with a temporary fix for the oceans, to tide us over until we can come up with a solution.
If this report is correct, we'll need some quick hacks, because sustainable energy production has no chance to solve the problem on time.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Pardon me sir/madam, your facts are not welcome here. You must take your hysteria-free reasoning and go call a right-wing talk show or something.
Micheal Crichton, whose best-selling techno-thriller disproved global warming hysteria with copious footnotes . . . or so called "scientists" working for a "university" producing "peer reviewed research?"
I tell you, these "facts" and "evidence" are trouble.
it often follows dire preconceptions and focuses on hysterical predictions in spite of obvious mitigating factors, most notably time scale, that dull real implications. if you sound the alarm bell, you get press and you get funding. if you say something like "more CO2 will increase the pH of the ocean, but at such a tiny amount over such a giant span of time, it doesn't make any sense to worry about it right now" then you won't make the slashdot front page. its "the emperor's new clothes" writ large. good science and good education is being done by climate researchers all over the globe... and also a pretty heavy dose of indoctrination and mythology making
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
if we are going to mitigate mankind's effects, we need to lose the hysteria
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm sure what you remember from high school is a good reason to dismiss the Carnegie Melon research team's results.
I think the important thing to ask is, "Who paid for the study?"
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The average quantity of material ejected by volcanoes is small compared to human production, particularly when talking about greenhouse gases, which are long-term agents. Ash is a short-term agent, and volcanoes are well-known to produce their materials in short bursts. They can certainly cause dramatic short-term problems. In terms of greenhouse gas production, though, they are not a large force.
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
Dumping fertilizer into the sea would also work to absorb CO2 by promoting the growth of sea plant life.
But any of these more biological solutions aren't really as easy as they first appear. Some forests produce large amounts of methane due to rotting plant material. In otherwords, some forests might actually just be greenhouse gas neutral (which makes sense, ecosystems work because they don't mess stuff up).
So yea. Capping emissions is a good idea.
It's volcanoes fault is a classic rationalize. There have been far worse volcanic episodes in the last flew million years without causing the spike we have seen in CO2. The increase in CO2 mirrors the onset of industrialization. Deal with it. In the short term acidification is probably a far worse problem than actual warming and ironically in the long run it's the most frightening. Also simply blocking sunlight seems like an extreme solution when we depend on the sun for food. The extreme end of that scale is called night. Which is easier in the end, behaving responsibly or spending trillions of dollars on unproven techniques for undoing the damage we are doing? If we'd simply spend the money spent on avoiding the issues on actual solutions we could fix the problem. I recently heard that it will likely cost an additional trillion dollars for carbon sequestering so we can keep burning coal, a trillion dollars! And that's just an estimate since it's also unproven technology. Is it smarter to keep spending trillions of dollars on the status quo or to fix the problem once and for all?
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?
Don't be a fool. There are obvious things that everyone can do to reduce pollution at a personal level.
40% of all car trips go less than 2 miles. Get a bike and use it when it makes sense.
Turn up your AC a few degrees. You'll use less energy.
Get a reusable shopping bag and stop using plastic ones.
It's not perfect, but it's much better than doing nothing. If I can do it, so can nearly everyone. If everyone did, we'd be in less trouble than we are now.
Most important option missing : Stop making more than 1 baby per couple !
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
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.
I was actually replying to the following idea:
I think the important thing to ask is, "Who paid for the study?"
This sort of reasoning is typically used to throw away useful results without properly analyzing the research. If the source of funding is affecting the results, then a peer-review of that research should turn up discrepancies.
On the other hand, believing an argument based on the authority of the person giving the argument isn't valid logic per se, but for everyday life, and general cases, its usually an effective short-cut. There are not enough hours in the day to properly validate every single claim we come across in every-day lives. However, these sorts of logical short-cuts should not be applied by scientists and policy-makers. These are the exact same people that are often asked to ignore the scientific evidence and give weight to emotional arguments.
For instance, it is one thing for you and I to disregard an oil company's research as "probably invalid." It is altogether entirely different for the scientific community and politicians to do so. They should not disregard the research because of the source.
Also, wait until you're older to have that one child.
A big part of the problem is also that when you live 80 years and have kids at 20, you have your kids, yourself, your parents at 40, your grandparents at 60, and your great-grandparents at 80 all alive at once.
If you're living to 80 and having kids at 15 each generation, that's your kids, you, your parents at 30, grandparents at 45, great-grandparents at 60, and great-great-grandparents at 75. Maybe even some great-great grandparents.
If, OTOH, you dial that back some and have kids at 30, you have you, your kids, and your parents at 60 and maybe some of your grandparents.
Three to four living generations are a lot more sustainable than six or seven. It's not all about the kids per generation, but also the time between generations.
"North America"
Hey, they said the oceans were gonna rise, right? So all that limestone sediment in the Mississippi drainage basin goes back into the sea, and the corals are fine. The humans get kinda screwed, though.
In the southern hemisphere, a great many. Why do you ask?
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Nonsense. Kids in grade 5 are performing experiments which confirm this effect. Here, you can try this one at home:
1. Obtain 2 glass jars, 2 thermometers, and a lamp.
2. Place thermometers inside jars, and place jars under the lamp (either with lid on, or upside-down).
3. After 20 minutes, check the temperature. Both readings should be identical.
4. Fill one jar with C02. After 20 minutes, check the temperature. Compare to initial readings.
I'm sure your children could have shown this to you if you had asked them, but, just on the off-chance that they haven't seen it, you might want to talk to them about it. It could be a fun science-based activity for the whole family!
"Do these climate models take into account the fact that Volcanoes erupt from time to time"
YES. Look carefully and you will find that models usually assume one large eruption per decade. The predicted cooling from the models assumptions was remarkably acurate in the case of observations from Mt Pinatubo, furthermore those predictions came from a model created 20yrs ago!
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