The sharp increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past two centuries years is transforming the chemistry of the world's oceans: As they have soaked up excess CO2, the pH balance of seawater -- the extent to which it is "acid" versus "basic" -- has shifted toward the more acidic.
"Climate change and ocean acidification are two sides of the same coin," says Sarah Cooley, a postdoc in marine chemistry and geochemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. "Ocean acidification comes from the rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and so does climate change, but at that point they diverge" into very different patterns of cause-and-effect.
As the ocean's carbon dioxide load is increasing, the amount of carbonate minerals in the water is decreasing, with the potential to render the marine environment a lot less hospitable to many animals. Over the next 90 years, this may well cause enormous economic losses worldwide, with the impacts reverberating very strongly through coastal communities.
Community leaders have tended not recognize the potential for ocean acidification to disrupt both economies and quality of life. In the December 2009 issue of the journal Oceanography, Cooley and colleagues offer the beginnings of a framework for thinking through such challenges.
"One thing that we hope that we're contributing is a look at what ocean acidification could do from a communities perspective," she says, to help planners and policymakers think about a complex scientific issue in terms they're most familiar with: dollars and cents.
"Assuming you could track a dollar through the economy, it could go all these different routes," says Cooley. "It might pay for a shellfish ornament" at a tourist gift shop, "but it might also pay for a dentist or a lawyer or a teacher."
A failing shellfish fishery doesn't just mean fewer scallops for dinner at a fine restaurant. It may lead to closing schools, reducing public services, and an exodus of population to find work.
"When you pose things in these terms, people stop and think, 'I didn't think about the possible effects on schools. I didn't consider that not just tourists, but also the service industries might be influenced...that could be me, that could be my neighbor.'
Cooley says her work borrows a great deal from the work ecological economists are doing in anticipating the economic and social costs of global warming. "We're borrowing a page from their playbook and doing the same in terms of ocean acidification."
The economic impacts of ocean acidification may well be in the billions and trillions of dollars.
Corals need carbonate minerals to build their hard branching shells. If changing marine pH levels affect coral reefs, they will be less able to protect shorelines from tides and storms, or provide fish habitat. These ecosystem services add up to an estimated $30 billion annually.
Vanishing corals would also weaken the tourist economies of many nations. Cooley profiles the potential costs to Tobago, where coral reef tourism directly and indirectly generates about 30 percent of the island's gross domestic product.
Fisheries, the main source of protein for around one billion people worldwide, will also be harmed by a more acidic ocean. Since myriad organisms up and down the food chain depend upon carbonate minerals to build their protective shells -- ranging from tiny foraminifera, which are at the base of the marine food chain, to species like scallops, oysters, clams, and mussels -- both shellfish and finfish species will both be at risk.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that the combined value of wild and farmed fisheries worldwide is around $170 billion a year.
Despite the bleak scenarios intrinsic in her study -- disappearing fish, fewer jobs, and unraveling communities (not to mention a shortage of seashell-covered ashtrays) -- Cooley emphasizes that her work is meant to inspire pragmatism, not despair.
"We need to be thinking ahead toward changes, not necessarily extinctions or catastrophic events," she says. "The point is not that 'All ocean life isn't gong to disappear.' It's like defensive driving-- you take precautions now so you won't have an accident later."
Image: "Calculated saturation states of aragonite, a form of calcium carbonate often used by calcifying organisms. Shades of red indicate areas where levels are so low that organisms may be unable to make new shells or skeletons, and where most unprotected aragonite structures will dissolve. By the end of this century, polar and temperate oceans may no longer contain enough aragonite to support the growth of calcifying organisms such as some mollusks, crustaceans, and corals. Click "Enlarge Image" for more information. (Richard A. Feely, Scott C. Doney, and Sarah R. Cooley, 2009, Oceanography 22:36-47)" Via Oceanus
Given a planet with the size, composition, frangible ecology and finite carrying capacity of Earth, could someone comment on how much longer the global limitations of Earth can be expected to sustain the unsated overconsumption, unbridled overproduction and unregulated overpopulation activities of the human species in our time?
Despite every effort to appear reasonable and sensible, the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us approach economic and ecologic problems in patently unsustainable ways by adamantly advocating and recklessly pursuing greed-driven schemes based upon the seemingly endless growth of human consumption, production and propagation that will lead humanity to precipitate, however inadvertently and soon, the destruction of life as we know it and the Earth as a fit place for human habitation, I suppose.
If the human community is in a race against time, even at this late hour when pathological arrogance, greed-mongering and elective mutism rule the world, is it ever too late to speak of what is true to you or to do the right thing, as best we can?
It appears to me as if one certain thing humanity cannot keep doing much longer is the very same thing we are so adamantly and foolishly doing now as the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us choose to recklessly speed up the ever increasing, seemingly endless growth of the global economy as well as to deceptively manipulate human beings into going along with a conspicuous per-capita overconsumption and unreserved overpopulation agenda.
If we keep doing what we are doing now and the human community keeps getting what it is getting now, I fear that sooner rather than later everything we are led to believe we are protecting and preserving will be ruined. In the not-too-distant future a distinct probability could exist that one of two colossal calamities will occur. The wanton dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of Earth’s frangible environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some unimaginable sort unless, of course, the world’s ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global political economy (the modern "economic colossus") continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic ‘wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point humanity's runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.
Could we talk about the need for a new vision for life on Earth?
Months ago Andy Revkin of the NYTimes and the Dot Earth community asked the question, "What does humanity do when we grow up?" Dr. Joel Cohen has explained elsewhere how humanity is currently in an adolescent phase of its development and is moving toward maturity. Other experts have suggested that the behavior of people in many places is even more primitive, in the sense of being less grown-up than adolescents and more nearly infantile.
Perhaps another way of coming up with a new vision would be to ask the question, "What might a human world look like when full grown, mature human beings with feet of clay design, construct and organize a new world order in the future?"
acidic oceans, classic global warming scientific illiteracy
sea water is in fact alkaline, extra Co2 slightly neutralizes the alkalinity making it a little less 'bleach like'
No sane person projects oceans crossing into an 'acid' Ph value.
This tiny change is perfectly harmless, consider that most life on Earth evolved with far higher Co2 levels, or in climatology-speak 'atmospheric pollution'!