There is a select all checkbox that is pre-selected. Click that select all and it deselects all, then click the save preferences text in the bottom of the modal that is designed not look like a button.
> Using a retrospective prediction from a regression models, we estimate an 8.3% increase in external carapace dissolution over the last two decades and identified a set of affected OA-related sublethal pathways to inform future risk assessment studies of Dungeness crabs.
Bad, but it seems no one actually measured this decades ago and it would be nice to have that data vs retrospective prediction. I believe them of course, it would just be nice to have real data if they’re claiming 8.3% estimation and not a range with expected looser precision for their sampling efforts.
It is quite unlikely that they can claim that much precision.
"8.3" probably reads as more authoritative than ">8%".
Whatever the case, 8% should be deeply alarming. Just how many % indicates a crashing ecosystem, and mass famine? Much of the world depends on ocean catch to get enough protein.
I think the point was more that your statement: "It is quite unlikely that they can claim that much precision." is non-obvious enough that it requires support.
Just a peek into how entire ecosystems might irreversibly collapse. Just imagine if krill shrimp are similarly affected as they are critical link in the food chain.
Evolution generally occurs over hundreds to thousands of generations, and frequently involves a significant bottlenecking event. Humans have a bad track record of harvesting bottlenecked species into extinction. Given that Dungeness crab is (IMO, but I'm not alone on this) the most delicious creature on this earth, this doesn't bode well for future generations of humans enjoying this once-plentiful delicacy
Dungeoness crabs are prized for their size and flavour. Evolution might very well say tough luck - crabs that large aren't sustainable in acidic water.
I, personally, think it's pretty selfish for us humans to whine about the difficulty of low flow toilets while species go extinct, but if it helps justify action then do realize that life is going to suck for everyone - steaks and salmon both have very real limits on their survival as climate change continues.
Millions of years from now, sure. In the near term future: mass extinction. A mass extinction in the seas means that the 1 billion people that rely on the ocean as their primary protein source would be in deep trouble.
Unfortunately carbon based shells are basically everywhere in the food chain, when the phytoplankton start disappearing it'll be fun to see climate change non-interventioners then!
This is an issue in the Puget Sound region as well (and, I'm assuming, many other areas). We're facing an acidification issue that's limiting smaller bivalves' (mussels, oysters) shell production. Generally they do okay once mature, but the seedlings don't stand a chance.
The article first said it was dissolving, then later it said it was affecting the shell's build up in the first place. Those may both be affected by alkalinity, but which is it technically?
They are the same effect. As the shell minerals grow they are dissolving at the same time. Growing and dissolving are two sides of the same reversible chemical reaction. The equilibrium point is a function of acidity. More acid yields slower growth as well as decreased compound stability. It is not one or the other, it is both.
Last time I went in the ocean I noticed my skin was getting burned a bit. My wife thinks it might be that same ocean acidification. Swim while you can I guess.
> Seawater is slightly basic, and ocean acidification involves a shift towards pH-neutral conditions rather than a transition to acidic conditions.
Also
> Between 1751 and 1996, surface ocean pH is estimated to have decreased from approximately 8.25 to 8.14
So we're not talking about water that is deadly to humans. Just water that disturbs certain delicate biological processes that could have knock-on effects to the food chain.
I've always gotten rashes from salt-water - I think that's just a thing for some people and I wouldn't read too much into acidification as a cause for that particular problem.
It's salt + sun + possible abrasion from sand, the change in pH is meaningless for someone swimming, we're talking about -0.05pH over a few decades or so.
I worked for a bit for a lobbying firm for commercial fishermen. They would spend money on all sorts of things: global warming, removing mining, removing dams. I asked my boss why weren't doing any messaging around ocean acidification.
"You don't tell people about the end of the world. If people knew how fucked they were, they would just get out of the industry and stop supporting us."
Seafood is the last wild food that normal people can still affordably and regularly eat. But there is a very real chance that our generation will be the last to do so.
At least along the coast and as far as 1000km inland, it won't just be the ocean ecosystems affected. Land mammals, birds and the forests themselves rely on nutrients directly from the ocean. The world as it is relies on oceans having life as it is. The oceans are tied to nearly every ecosystem in the world in some way or another.
Already by the twelfth century, fishing pressure and human modification of riverine and estuarine habitats threatened sturgeon populations from Italy to the Baltic.
A brief history of aquatic resource use in medieval Europe
Richard C. Hoffmann
I talked to someone who was an agricultural scientist, working for a fishing company in Seattle. When I brought up how I heard the oceans would be unfishable in 50 years, he said, "That's not true."
He want to to say the fishery industry is concerned with sustainability, after all these fisheries have been around for generations and want to stay that way. He claimed they carefully monitored fish populations to maintain stability in fishing.
I don't know enough about the subject. He could have been touting the official line fed to him, but he could have also been telling us the honest truth based on his team/company's research.
>The ocean is acidifying because it's absorbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which lowers pH levels in the water.
Doesn't matter how sustainable the fishing practices are, or how well they manage the populations, if the water quality won't support a population to begin with.
The Canadian government was carefully monitoring Atlantic cod too. Until they completely collapsed. These systems are apparently too complex for us to make good predictions.
Scientists correctly predicted that catch quotas needed to be set much lower. The government discounted the lower-end predictions of sustainable catch rates or even ignored them outright, choosing instead to "balance" the scientists' advice against "socio-economic considerations." But nature cannot be fooled, so socio-economic conditions deteriorated abruptly and catastrophically in the 1990s as the ecological conditions did likewise.
At the current rate of acidification, nothing that requires a calcium skeleton will be able to exist by the early 2030s in northern seas - it’s going to be a catastrophic collapse.
Cnidaria look like they may end up being pretty much the sole survivors - it has happened before
The Jurassic had higher CO2 levels than today, but the rate of change in atmospheric CO2 was much, much slower than today.
To provide an analogy:
Most folks are concerned about our acceleration, not our velocity. You can accelerate to 60mph slowly and comfortably, or you can accelerate to 60mph fast enough to kill you. It's not like 60mph is the problem, it's that if your biological systems don't have enough time to recover from the acceleration you will suffer consequences.
I think a another example to convey the message to the average person would be slowing down from 60mph. You can do so by pressing on the breaks or by slamming into a tree. Suddenly stopping by hitting a tree is something more people have indirect experience with than the idea of a speed increase strong enough to cause the same problems.
There was some hand-waving going on, let me unpack it more fully.
Oxygen, the molecule, is apolar and un-ionized. Ozone is not. The amount of ozone in the atmosphere, hence dissolving into the oceans, is predicated on how much oxygen is present during lightning strikes, which is dictated by the partial pressure of oxygen.
More generally, oxygen is reactive, and contributes to reactions in an electron-donating capacity, what we call 'oxidizing' whether or not oxygen is involved. Alkalines are oxidizing, acids are reducing; if you add HCL to KOH, the H+ will reduce the OH-, or equivalently, the OH- will oxidize the H+.
The safest answer would have actually been: we can do some vague guessing about conditions 150 million years ago, but we certainly can't go back in time and measure it. The existence of crabs is proof that they could form shells under those conditions; what those conditions were, is guesswork.
> There is evidence for high CO2 concentrations between 200 and 150 million years ago of over 3,000 ppm, and between 600 and 400 million years ago of over 6,000 ppm.
For comparison:
> Global annual mean CO2 concentration has increased by more than 45% since the start of the Industrial Revolution, from 280 ppm during the 10,000 years up to the mid-18th century to 415 ppm as of May 2019. The present concentration is the highest for 14 million years.
These are fascinating facts. Thanks for digging this up. Does anyone know what the max rate of change around ~150m and ~500m years ago was? I reckon this information might not be available.
It's very hard to look back that far and compare to the measurements today because our rate of rise now is easily measured across years, whereas the data for millions of years ago is via the geological and fossil records, which records time on a longer scale. I recall that when they've modeled possible events which would sharply raise the C02 levels, it takes a very significant like the end of an ice age or huge amounts of volcanic activity.
From the fossil record we know that we last had something similar to the current levels about 15-20 million years ago, when our ancestors were just great apes. It was indeed a few degrees warmer and the sea level was higher. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008152242.h...
Doesn't matter. What does matter is the rate of change, and whether each species that makes up the ocean ecosystem can adapt fast enough to survive. Those that can't, go extinct. If enough of certain key species decline enough, the ocean ecosystem collapses, many more species go extinct, and around again.
The ocean will certainly recover in a few thousand years, or at worst a million. Human civilization's immediate prospects are less optimistic.
After a worldwide collapse of civilization, and forced population reduction below two billion, civilization will also begin to recover, and take maybe a century or three to get back to, say, the level of launching satellites. Global thermonuclear war could be expected postpone recovery to the upper end of the range.
After the end-Permian extinction (the worst mass extinction in the Earth's history), life took several million years to recover. From Wikipedia:
> Research indicates that recovery did not begin until the start of the mid-Triassic, 4 to 6 million years after the extinction;[73] and some writers estimate that the recovery was not complete until 30 Ma after the P–Tr extinction, i.e. in the late Triassic.[8]
The current extinction might not be as severe, but "a few thousand years" sounds really optimistic.
The P-Tr extinction was overwhelmingly worse than we are capable of, even on our worst day. It drove every single obligate-shelled ocean species to extinction. The ones with shells that came after were descended from those that had lost their shells, and then evolved them again.
If civilization collapses, the sudden pulse of reforestation and radical reduction in CO2 production will clear the excess in a few decades. Many shelled species will survive just by waiting it out; do you recall the 400-year-old clam that turned up recently? It is mostly the larval forms at risk.
The problem with civilization recovery is that the warming won't stop after it goes past some key thresholds. The positive feedback effects will keep pushing temperatures higher, and the CO2 already in the atmosphere will stay up there for thousands of years.
In that scenario civilization will have a very difficult time recovering, especially considering the massive disruption to agriculture.
This is technically true, but it does not comprehend the threat. Crab populations (etc) can survive in a broad range of CO2 levels, but there is no reason to think that they can survive a rapid CO2 and acidity transition like the one that is underway right now. Corals are among the threatened organisms, and they can't migrate very quickly. Coral reefs, in turn, are a habitat for organisms like crabs (and 25% of marine species overall) and if they die off quickly, the underlying ecosystem is obviously under threat.
In other words: geological-scale change allows time for species and ecosystems to adapt and migrate. Rapid ecological change is correlated with loss of biomass, biodiversity, and species. The source of risk is not the CO2 level, but the rate at which it has changed.
"As for the acidifying ocean, NOAA proposes two methods of attack: Reducing our overall carbon footprint to reduce the carbon dioxide absorbed by the sea, or teach wildlife and the people who rely on it to adapt to how the sea will change."
People sometimes consider using sulfur dioxide aerosols to lower global temperatures as an emergency measure. And it might be that there are potential climate emergencies that that would be the least worst option for if we can't otherwise get our act together. But it would be terrible if it came to that because it would make the ocean acidifcation problem even worse.
Yes. It is caused by absorbing CO2 faster than ocean circulation can offset it by dissolving lime from the bottom of the ocean.
If the CO2 rises and stays raised, in a few thousand years the Ph will go back to its old value.
If we wanted to solve this problem, one of the better ideas is to crush limestone and dump it into the ocean. As a powder so that it dissolves before it can sink.
This is brilliant and I feel foolish for never having thought of it. No one is going to stop someone from dumping barges worth of powdered limestone into the ocean; and one with the means could action this immediately.
Nobody cares about the absolute pH, except insofar as it affects wildlife and the ability of the oceans to provide protein that billions of people depend on to live.
The self-ionization constant of water, Kw, changes with temperature, pressure, and ionic strength.
Kw is also used as cologarithm pKw. If you are not aware, X = 10^(-pX), and pX = -log(X). So a lower pH is a greater concentration of [H+] (actually [H3O+]), a lower pOH is a greater concentration of [OH-], and a lower pKw is a greater self-ionization of water.
pKw decreases with increasing temperature. It decreases with increasing pressure. And it decreases with increasing ionic strength until around 0.6-0.8, then goes back up.
While those are held constant, a dropping pH does indicate acidification. pH + pOH = pKw . But if they are not constant, pOH can drop at the same rate as pH, because pKw is also dropping. As long as pH and pOH are both near pKw/2, the solution is neutral. The solution is only acidifying when pH is decreasing faster than pOH.
If you become slightly less basic, your pOH goes up. Under normal circumstances, that means pH is going down by an equal amount. Either way you describe it in English, de-alkalinization usually yields the same mathematical results as acidification. Deviation from this rule, which holds at standard temperature and pressure, and constant ionic strength, requires additional explanation.
It doesn't even matter which way the environment is going, just that it's going faster than ever. Organisms like these crabs could surely adapt to a wide range of circumstances, but only with a lot of time to evolve over. And our reckless industry is not giving them any time.
Acidification is the correct term to refer to something becoming more acidic (or "less basic" if you prefer). It doesn't mean that something has a pH below 7.
pH is directly related to the concentration of H+ ions in solution, which is equivalent to being inversely correlated with the concentration of OH- ions in solution (a reduction in OH- ion concentration means a relative increase in H+ ion concentration).
> The crab larvae that showed signs that their shells were dissolving were smaller than the other larvae, too.
From sciencedirect.com:
> To our knowledge this is the first time that OA-related dissolution of calcite structures in situ has been demonstrated for crustaceans
> Using a retrospective prediction from a regression models, we estimate an 8.3% increase in external carapace dissolution over the last two decades
Given that not all larva show signs of OA-dissolution and this is the first study, it would be wise to wait for the next studies, to see actual trends.
The present concentration of co2 in the atmosphere according to Zhang, Yi Ge; et al. is the highest in 14m years. Given crabs in general have been around adapting for 145m years, I do not think the current levels will be detrimental.
People always say this as if evolution often works on the scale of generations. They had 14M years to adjust to the reduction, why do you think they can adapt to the increase in a decade or two?
> Given crabs in general have been around adapting for 145m years, I do not think the current levels will be detrimental.
That argument often comes up when discussing wildlife impacts of global warming. The problem is, the rate of CO2 increase vastly exceeds anything that happened naturally. The rate of change is the problem here.
This is not true. Given that temperature and co2 rise sync with each other(still debated) and OA are fairly synchronous, the steep decline and subsequent rise in temperature from appx. 8400ya - 8000ya(Vinther, B., et al., 2009) exceeds what we are seeing now. Notably that fall and rise was at a much higher temperature as well. I can only assume this has happened many many times previously.
I don't believe the temperature changes 8400-8000ya were associated with the same change in CO2 levels we're seeing now. CO2 has been a lagging indicator of temperature in the past, but I don't believe it's been a driver like it is today.
>The present concentration of co2 in the atmosphere according to Zhang, Yi Ge; et al. is the highest in 14m years. Given crabs in general have been around adapting for 145m years, I do not think the current levels will be detrimental.
It's not my field, but doesn't the rate-of-change matter even more than absolute value in time? Life can and does adjust, but it takes generations; if things change too fast, then only the quickest (smallest) life-forms can adapt.
"not unusual" is a little facetious, don't you think? Vinther was studying a drastic loss of polar ice in reaction to a historical (unexplained?) sudden rise in temperature, and raising an alarm in light of our current warming.
I was not trying to be facetious. I think that since we have seen two similar rises in temperature in the last 10,000 years, it is very likely they have occurred relatively frequently in the past 145m years. I do not see how what he is studying is relevant here.
I'm reminded of an old mentor's saying: One is an anomaly, two is a coincidence, three is a pattern. I'd be interested to know the causes and the effects of the temperature rise that makes you think this one is no big deal. There is a lot of evidence to indicate it's a very big deal.
I would love to know the causes and effects as well. Given evidence is still lacking, and this article is regarding a study that has only been done once, I would like to see follow up studies to see a pattern arise in OA effects on this species.
They haven't had to adapt at this rapid of pace. And this is also a human story. Yes the crabs may pull through but not in the abundance to provide us a food source.
It's not like battery acid is dissolving their shells. The ocean's PH is at around 8.1 which means it's alkaline, not acidic. These creatures rely on calcification for creating their shells, so it's that process which is being disrupted (the article does briefly mention that in between the scary headline and other scary/incorrect assertions).
Plenty of bivalves and shellfish live in fresh water which has significantly lower PH levels (more like 7-7.5) and survive so this isn't some harbinger of the apocalypse, but it is change nonetheless.
Thanx Mikeb85 , I was asking myself: "am I mad ?" as 8.1 is not acid so... you said so ..., so I am not mad, it just that big news agencies are creating clickbaits .... ;(
Apologies, but I don't really understand the parent post's concern or your confusion - do people really think that "too acidic" is a misleading description of the problem, and that this article is therefore clickbait created by "big news agencies"? If an animal adapts to N ph, and has problems at N-0.1 ph, then surely it's rational and honest to say that the animal's environment has become "too acidic" for it, regardless of how acidic the number "seems" to us? Is this somehow different from temperature changes, where I feel like most people wouldn't be confused by what we would feel is "cold" being described as "too warm" for another species?
"So acidic" is somewhat misleading when the ocean isn't "acidic" at all, at least based on conventional usage of the word as we typically refer to liquids with PH levels below 7 as acidic and above 7 as basic or alkaline. Also the use of the word 'dissolving' seems somewhat suspect as the crabs with shell defects simply didn't form their shells properly, it wasn't adult crabs melting away in an acidic slurry...
A less misleading title would be "PH changes in ocean affect crab shell formation" or something like that.
No offense, but is it possible your life experiences have you subconsciously looking for a political angle? I could be wrong, but the idea that "so acidic" is misleading because we're talking about values on the basic half of the ph meter is just way out there to me. Again, I can't see the difference between this and saying that 40 degree F water is "so warm" in some specific context, where in an information void that sounds cold. Similarly, acidity and alkalinity are purely relative in all my experience of the usage of those terms, both scientifically and colloquially.
Yeah, my life experiences are such that I've lived long enough to remember several times people thought the world was going to end, WW3 would happen, and a bunch of doomsday predictions that should have but haven't happened.
Or maybe it's the fact I'm Canadian and we generally push back against extremism, alarmism, most isms really.
I've heard there's a hole in the ozone and we're all going to die from cancer and I've heard that New York will be underwater and all the glaciers will be gone by 2020. I've lived through 2 US presidents everyone has said are Hitler and somehow, despite the uproar being the loudest today, the world hasn't come to an end and things actually don't seem that bad.
So yes, when I see headlines that are obviously click bait it hits this little part of my brain that feels compelled to say that maybe, just maybe things aren't all that bad.
And your quite reasonable view is, as usual, being downvoted, despite there being nothing controversial in what you posted, as you posted your personal life experience.
And no doubt this post too will suffer the same fate for coming to your defence. So be it.
Yeah, it seems nowadays either you're with Trump/Brexit/Jesus/KKK or Greta/ElizaBernieBidenOC/Stalin and anything in between can't be fathomed.
Like I dunno, I like the environment (and have probably spent more time lost in the wild than 99% of this sub ever will) and I also like economic development. I also believe that some political goals maybe should be pursued carefully lest opinion shift too far the other direction and the masses wind up crucifying you...
Global warming is tough because we could destroy our economy in order to not emit any CO2 and nothing would happen unless we get cooperation from everyone else because CO2 levels are cumulative. It's very much a prisoners dillema sort of game and I really don't think most 'environmentalists' really want to do what it takes.
I personally don't care, someone else commented on it though. And yes, pretty much all nuance has been eliminated from discussions on a lot of topics these days.
> I've heard there's a hole in the ozone and we're all going to die from cancer
The reason you don't hear that anymore is not because there was no problem, but because the problem has been fixed by the implementation of the Montreal protocol. The ozon layer has been gradually recovering ever since.
Just because we avoided some disasters (WW3) and acted globally to prevent others (ozone hole) doesn't mean they weren't real issues with potentially disastrous consequences. In fact we should be looking at how we avoided some of those outcomes and learn from them. The ozone hole is particularly illustrative because of it's similarity to today's problem with CO2.
> Or maybe it's the fact I'm Canadian and we generally push back against extremism, alarmism, most isms really.
How about other forms of alarmism, the reducing use of fossil fuels will destroy our way of life, collapse the economy, etc? I see a lot of people worried about "climate alarmism" but they never seem to be concerned about there own alarmsism.
> and I've heard that New York will be underwater and all the glaciers will be gone by 2020
Citation please? I see this claim frequently yet either no citations are provided or they rely on the readers lack of comprehension, memory or both. The alarmisim is probably in your head.
As for calling it "too acidic", that's fairly obviously more understandable for the lay reader than "not basic enough" would be.
Any credible sources? In the first link, that's not a quote from Jim Hansen, that's a quote from Bob Reiss said that Hansen said 12 years earlier. I don't know how credible Reiss is supposed to be but there's no context to address Hansen there.
For number 2, yes they revised the timeline, the glaciers are still retreating. Does an extrapolation on a long running process even count as being alarmist?
"... so acidic..." implies the substance in question is actually an acid. That's what the title used.
"...too acidic..." doesn't carry that same implication. On some scale, something is more acidic than optimum.
At least, that's the way I interpret the comments above. After reading the article, I knew exactly what was happening and didn't really think the title was click-bait, but can see how others might perceive it that way.
I really don't understand why this distinction matters. If the ecosystem collapses because development is hindered, that's just as bad as the scenario where the animals were outright killed after developing just fine. It's a huge problem either way.
The headline is technically wrong, but the broad point, "things that we rely on are dying because of the changing pH of the ocean", is correct and meaningful.
Science doesn't operate on the theory that we can disregard the actual words and just go with the general flow, and when people report this way the inevitable corrections lend fuel to the "science doesn't work" fire. For the sake of getting people to take science seriously, let's try and leave that kind of "ignore the words and listen to the sound of my voice" to marketing.
Freshwater animals aren't really relevant since they aren't going to do any good for life in the ocean if the animals that evolved for PH of 8.1 can't survive due to decreasing alkalinity. If the ocean life can't adapt it very well could be a harbinger of the apocalypse. Not saying it will, but your assertion that it isn't is also a false bromide.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that since life has existed on earth for quite some time, through changing conditions (CO2 levels were far, far higher at one point in earth's existence!) and in many different biomes, life will continue to exist. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if in ~20 years we find that these crabs, through natural selection, manage to keep their shells or adapt through some other means.
The amount of time given to adapt to those changes seems likely to have a big effect on how well organisms weather them... just because the same conditions existed x million years ago doesn’t mean that life can deal with it if the same change happens over 100 years.
Does it? Normally I hate to be the guy to ask for some sort of citation but on this subject, all I hear is doom and gloom yet none of the dire predictions ever come to fruition.
That article defines a "mass extinction event" as 75% of species dying off within a specific timeframe, but then goes on to say that 50% of species might be extinct by the end of the century. Later it says 7% of species have gone extinct. Far cry from 75%.
The end of the centuary is only 80 years away, or ~4 human gereations. There are humans alive today that will experience it. In geological time, that is practically nothing.
The artivle you are refring to also says that the current rate of extinction is 10-100x that if previus mass extinctions. Unless you have some reason to believe we will manage to stop the ongoing ectinction event, then it will be a mass extinction by the time it is done; hence saying that we are in it.
There have been times when almost all life on earth died out. So like, yes we will continue to having living things on earth probably until it's swallowed by the sun, but that doesn't mean that it will remain habitable for any of the species that currently live here, including ourselves.
It's true that life has existed for a long time and survived a number of mass die-offs, but humans have only been around for a tiny sliver of that time.
So yeah, it's unlikely that humans could kill off all life on earth even if we keep trying to do so, but it's certainly possible that they'll cause their own destruction.
I think it's unlikely that human activity will lead to mass die-offs (of humans, we're already in a mass extinction event of animals) but our children and grandchildren may be in for a big lifestyle change.
Earth has also undergone at least five mass extinction events that killed between 70-98% of life on the planet. Rapid changes in atmospheric conditions are not friendly to life. Life is not robust or particularly adaptable at the species level, or on non-geological timescales.
The ocean Ph level doesn't have much to do with CO2 levels. It has everything to do with the rate of change of CO2 levels.
If you raise the CO2 level fast, the ocean turns acidic. If you raise it slowly, deposits of lime on the bottom of the ocean dissolve and Ph remains constant.
While CO2 has been much higher than the present, the rate of change is unprecedented.
Also evolution is a lot slower than you think. A change in Ph over millions of years could readily be adapted to by evolution. Over 20, not so much.
As for the crabs, some of them still develop hard shells. They'll reproduce and the soft-shelled ones won't. So whatever it is that causes harder shells will persist.
The fast mode is that if there is enough genetic diversity in the population that a subset have a combination of traits that suffices, natural selection quickly will reduce the genetic diversity and all of the survivors will have those traits. The advantage of sexual reproduction is that much of the genetic diversity is retained and gets to recombine in interesting ways allowing the next challenge to be addressed.
The slow mode is that if overcoming a barrier requires random mutations to produce new traits, it takes many generations for that to happen.
The current pH allows some to survive and others not to. But with projected future pH levels, none will be able to survive. Therefore natural selection will select out the entire population as there isn't enough time for a new set of traits to evolve.
The rate of potential mutation in a species is tied to the reproduction rate.
Evolution in bacteria can therefore happen much more quickly than in larger organisms. Evolution in viruses is quicker still. (The flu that comes around each year is noticeably evolved from last year's one. In particular it is bred to avoid triggering immune system responses to recent flu variants.)
Crabs can't evolve at anything like the rate of bacteria.
So you predict extinction instead of adaptation or rather speciation (new cell lines resilient in a new environment which form a distinctly new genome)?
On current projections of ocean acidification, extinction is inevitable for this type of crab.
The only news here is that they have actually been measured to be impacted at rates that they were predicted to be impacted. The overall conclusion of what will happen is not changed.
This is where I would disagree with your belief that mutations are caused by replication rates rather than environmental feedback responses. The bandwidth of environmental sampling of larger species such as these crabs permits greater adaptability in near-future generations. I speak specifically to metabolizing de novo proteins in this novel environment which promote cellular replication stability, ie survival, eg enteric coatings.
I think you presuppose climate change is a disaster in your extinction judgment rather than a transient response to human industrialization.
Life on Earth had survived many much more dramatic events. Some had caused mass extinctions, but those organisms that survived soon captured the planet and thrived in a vacated environment.
What I'm really worried about is that future brings us much more severe issues to deal with, which no multicellular life can survive. [1] The problem is quite urgent, and we only have 500M-1B years to deal with this.
In theory you are right, in practice threatened and endangered species may not have the population diversity for selective pressure to outpace population decline.
The article didn't state this, does anyone know the actual pH change? The oceans are so large and so buffered I'm surprised the magnitude of pH change would be so dramatic.
"In the 200-plus years since the industrial revolution began, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has increased due to humans burning fossil fuels (such as car emissions) and changing the way land is used (such as deforestation). During this time, the pH of surface ocean waters has fallen by 0.1 pH units. The pH scale, like the Richter scale, is logarithmic, so this change represents approximately a 30 percent increase in acidity."
The oceans are so large and so buffered I'm surprised the magnitude of pH change would be so dramatic.
The carbon dioxide isn't distributed evenly throughout the volume of the oceans. The pH change would be significantly slower if the whole volume could equilibrate instantaneously.
Currently, about half of the anthropogenic (human-caused) carbon dioxide in the ocean is found in the upper 400 meters (1,200 feet) of the water column, while the other half has penetrated into the lower thermocline and deep ocean. Density- and wind-driven circulation help mix the surface and deep waters in some high latitude and coastal regions, but for much of the open ocean, deep pH changes are expected to lag surface pH changes by a few centuries.
This is especially a problem for oceanic life because the vast majority of biological productivity and food people eat is also found in that upper portion. The euphotic zone where most photosynthesis takes place extends to about 200 meters below the surface.
Nothing will change until every single person that calls for climate change stops using gas, plastic and any other CO2 causing activity. (like flying in planes, dirty fossil fuel burning ships, etc...)
Can't demand others to do it you won't do it first.
That's not what I am referring to. You can't get the masses to support climate change when the leaders of climate change are some of the worst polluters.
> Can't demand others to do it you won't do it first.
Saving the environment is not about individual choice, it's about fixing an unsustainable system. It's unsustainable because negative externalities are not effectively taxed/banned. Bad behaviour is rewarded financially which further drives change in the wrong direction.
Making it about individual choice, and therefore subject to "hypocrisy" is an effective way of preventing change. Divide and conquer. It's undeniably the pervasive narative in the media (but again this can be explained by systemic effects - where does the money come from? Who stands to benefit?).
You can demand new rules that come in for everyone at the same time. That's how tax rates change, how universal healthcare systems are established, how slavery is ended.
Societies are ultimately shaped by what people believe is possible.
Edit: Your comment has changed, but you're still expressing the conviction that everyone has to do things voluntarily. That's not true - only enough power has to come together to make and enforce laws. A high bar, but not as insurmountable.
> Societies are ultimately shaped by what people believe is possible.
This is exactly my point. If 100% of the people calling for climate change "rules/laws" have no ability to follow their own ideas now, what hope is there?
(I removed one sentence that I felt was a little inflammatory, it was extraneous)
As I was taking a shower this morning watching the suds go down the drain, I thought to myself, "I wonder if we are making the oceans more basic." I guess not. Where does all that soap go then?
scary clickbait from fox (vegas). This is beneath you all - I'm ashamed of this community that can't resist the base sensationalism of a morally bankrupt media source.
The ocean has always been highly acidic, and was only able to support complex life once enough coccolithophores bloomed and died, and the ocean dissolved enough of their carbonate sediments that it made the ocean less acidic. An increase in carbon dioxide has been slowly re-acidifying the ocean.
If calcium carbonate-dense phytoplankton die off, the ocean gets fucked, and it'll no longer trap half the carbon dioxide generated on the planet, nor generate over half the planet's oxygen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
Conservatives discount stories like this. That's because they believe the natural world is such that it is impossible for the unregulated operations of the free market change nature in ways that would be harmful to the human race.
166 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadThe page you are attempting to access is not available in your country.
About a hundred 3rd party vendors each with their own checkbox.
Of course, they have an accept all button. But not a reject all.
The fox5 thingy is more honest, at least they refuse to be accessible from Europe.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/27/us/pacific-ocean-acidificatio...
> Using a retrospective prediction from a regression models, we estimate an 8.3% increase in external carapace dissolution over the last two decades and identified a set of affected OA-related sublethal pathways to inform future risk assessment studies of Dungeness crabs.
Bad, but it seems no one actually measured this decades ago and it would be nice to have that data vs retrospective prediction. I believe them of course, it would just be nice to have real data if they’re claiming 8.3% estimation and not a range with expected looser precision for their sampling efforts.
Edit: for clarity
>> we estimate an 8.3% increase
> it would just be nice to have real data if they’re claiming exactly 8.3%
Point of fact, they don't claim "exactly" 8.3% -- they call it an estimate, and the notation indicates uncertainty -- read it as 8.3 ± 0.1%.
"8.3" probably reads as more authoritative than ">8%".
Whatever the case, 8% should be deeply alarming. Just how many % indicates a crashing ecosystem, and mass famine? Much of the world depends on ocean catch to get enough protein.
~8.1% was not alarming 50 years ago, so why 8.3% should be alarming now? I would be more concerned about the curve slope and shape.
Can you quantify that statement with any rigor?
I, personally, think it's pretty selfish for us humans to whine about the difficulty of low flow toilets while species go extinct, but if it helps justify action then do realize that life is going to suck for everyone - steaks and salmon both have very real limits on their survival as climate change continues.
Millions of years from now, sure. In the near term future: mass extinction. A mass extinction in the seas means that the 1 billion people that rely on the ocean as their primary protein source would be in deep trouble.
We are in a hole and I'd like to know who's still holding a shovel.
> Seawater is slightly basic, and ocean acidification involves a shift towards pH-neutral conditions rather than a transition to acidic conditions.
Also
> Between 1751 and 1996, surface ocean pH is estimated to have decreased from approximately 8.25 to 8.14
So we're not talking about water that is deadly to humans. Just water that disturbs certain delicate biological processes that could have knock-on effects to the food chain.
"You don't tell people about the end of the world. If people knew how fucked they were, they would just get out of the industry and stop supporting us."
Seafood is the last wild food that normal people can still affordably and regularly eat. But there is a very real chance that our generation will be the last to do so.
A brief history of aquatic resource use in medieval Europe Richard C. Hoffmann
He want to to say the fishery industry is concerned with sustainability, after all these fisheries have been around for generations and want to stay that way. He claimed they carefully monitored fish populations to maintain stability in fishing.
I don't know enough about the subject. He could have been touting the official line fed to him, but he could have also been telling us the honest truth based on his team/company's research.
Doesn't matter how sustainable the fishing practices are, or how well they manage the populations, if the water quality won't support a population to begin with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
Cnidaria look like they may end up being pretty much the sole survivors - it has happened before
To provide an analogy: Most folks are concerned about our acceleration, not our velocity. You can accelerate to 60mph slowly and comfortably, or you can accelerate to 60mph fast enough to kill you. It's not like 60mph is the problem, it's that if your biological systems don't have enough time to recover from the acceleration you will suffer consequences.
But partial pressure of oxygen gas was also higher, and oxygen is highly alkaline.
Oxygen, the molecule, is apolar and un-ionized. Ozone is not. The amount of ozone in the atmosphere, hence dissolving into the oceans, is predicated on how much oxygen is present during lightning strikes, which is dictated by the partial pressure of oxygen.
More generally, oxygen is reactive, and contributes to reactions in an electron-donating capacity, what we call 'oxidizing' whether or not oxygen is involved. Alkalines are oxidizing, acids are reducing; if you add HCL to KOH, the H+ will reduce the OH-, or equivalently, the OH- will oxidize the H+.
The safest answer would have actually been: we can do some vague guessing about conditions 150 million years ago, but we certainly can't go back in time and measure it. The existence of crabs is proof that they could form shells under those conditions; what those conditions were, is guesswork.
Same deal with oxygen, except that reactivity between oxygen and water (but not oxygen and ozone) is much lower.
Nitric acid is an oxidizer. Hydroiodic acid is a reducing agent.
Lithium peroxide is an alkaline oxidizer. Lithium aluminum hydride is an alkaline reducing agent.
> There is evidence for high CO2 concentrations between 200 and 150 million years ago of over 3,000 ppm, and between 600 and 400 million years ago of over 6,000 ppm.
For comparison:
> Global annual mean CO2 concentration has increased by more than 45% since the start of the Industrial Revolution, from 280 ppm during the 10,000 years up to the mid-18th century to 415 ppm as of May 2019. The present concentration is the highest for 14 million years.
From the fossil record we know that we last had something similar to the current levels about 15-20 million years ago, when our ancestors were just great apes. It was indeed a few degrees warmer and the sea level was higher. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008152242.h...
We do have very good levels from the more recent history from ice cores, which shows that the current rate of change is unequalled: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
And it didn't end up well, Permian-Triassic extinction event was the biggest mass extinction in history.
https://marinebiology.co/2015/04/10/greatest-mass-extinction...
The ocean will certainly recover in a few thousand years, or at worst a million. Human civilization's immediate prospects are less optimistic.
After a worldwide collapse of civilization, and forced population reduction below two billion, civilization will also begin to recover, and take maybe a century or three to get back to, say, the level of launching satellites. Global thermonuclear war could be expected postpone recovery to the upper end of the range.
Not with all the easily accessible hydrocarbons gone it won’t.
> Research indicates that recovery did not begin until the start of the mid-Triassic, 4 to 6 million years after the extinction;[73] and some writers estimate that the recovery was not complete until 30 Ma after the P–Tr extinction, i.e. in the late Triassic.[8]
The current extinction might not be as severe, but "a few thousand years" sounds really optimistic.
If civilization collapses, the sudden pulse of reforestation and radical reduction in CO2 production will clear the excess in a few decades. Many shelled species will survive just by waiting it out; do you recall the 400-year-old clam that turned up recently? It is mostly the larval forms at risk.
In that scenario civilization will have a very difficult time recovering, especially considering the massive disruption to agriculture.
In other words: geological-scale change allows time for species and ecosystems to adapt and migrate. Rapid ecological change is correlated with loss of biomass, biodiversity, and species. The source of risk is not the CO2 level, but the rate at which it has changed.
teach wildlife to adapt - GLWT
The concern is that the gradient of change is too steep.
If the CO2 rises and stays raised, in a few thousand years the Ph will go back to its old value.
If we wanted to solve this problem, one of the better ideas is to crush limestone and dump it into the ocean. As a powder so that it dissolves before it can sink.
How much limestone do we need?
Nobody cares about the absolute pH, except insofar as it affects wildlife and the ability of the oceans to provide protein that billions of people depend on to live.
And that is being affected, as noted in TFA.
Kw is also used as cologarithm pKw. If you are not aware, X = 10^(-pX), and pX = -log(X). So a lower pH is a greater concentration of [H+] (actually [H3O+]), a lower pOH is a greater concentration of [OH-], and a lower pKw is a greater self-ionization of water.
pKw decreases with increasing temperature. It decreases with increasing pressure. And it decreases with increasing ionic strength until around 0.6-0.8, then goes back up.
While those are held constant, a dropping pH does indicate acidification. pH + pOH = pKw . But if they are not constant, pOH can drop at the same rate as pH, because pKw is also dropping. As long as pH and pOH are both near pKw/2, the solution is neutral. The solution is only acidifying when pH is decreasing faster than pOH.
If you become slightly less basic, your pOH goes up. Under normal circumstances, that means pH is going down by an equal amount. Either way you describe it in English, de-alkalinization usually yields the same mathematical results as acidification. Deviation from this rule, which holds at standard temperature and pressure, and constant ionic strength, requires additional explanation.
pH is directly related to the concentration of H+ ions in solution, which is equivalent to being inversely correlated with the concentration of OH- ions in solution (a reduction in OH- ion concentration means a relative increase in H+ ion concentration).
/s
From sciencedirect.com:
> To our knowledge this is the first time that OA-related dissolution of calcite structures in situ has been demonstrated for crustaceans
> Using a retrospective prediction from a regression models, we estimate an 8.3% increase in external carapace dissolution over the last two decades
Given that not all larva show signs of OA-dissolution and this is the first study, it would be wise to wait for the next studies, to see actual trends.
The present concentration of co2 in the atmosphere according to Zhang, Yi Ge; et al. is the highest in 14m years. Given crabs in general have been around adapting for 145m years, I do not think the current levels will be detrimental.
That argument often comes up when discussing wildlife impacts of global warming. The problem is, the rate of CO2 increase vastly exceeds anything that happened naturally. The rate of change is the problem here.
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11362
It's not my field, but doesn't the rate-of-change matter even more than absolute value in time? Life can and does adjust, but it takes generations; if things change too fast, then only the quickest (smallest) life-forms can adapt.
Plenty of bivalves and shellfish live in fresh water which has significantly lower PH levels (more like 7-7.5) and survive so this isn't some harbinger of the apocalypse, but it is change nonetheless.
A less misleading title would be "PH changes in ocean affect crab shell formation" or something like that.
Or maybe it's the fact I'm Canadian and we generally push back against extremism, alarmism, most isms really.
I've heard there's a hole in the ozone and we're all going to die from cancer and I've heard that New York will be underwater and all the glaciers will be gone by 2020. I've lived through 2 US presidents everyone has said are Hitler and somehow, despite the uproar being the loudest today, the world hasn't come to an end and things actually don't seem that bad.
So yes, when I see headlines that are obviously click bait it hits this little part of my brain that feels compelled to say that maybe, just maybe things aren't all that bad.
And no doubt this post too will suffer the same fate for coming to your defence. So be it.
Like I dunno, I like the environment (and have probably spent more time lost in the wild than 99% of this sub ever will) and I also like economic development. I also believe that some political goals maybe should be pursued carefully lest opinion shift too far the other direction and the masses wind up crucifying you...
Global warming is tough because we could destroy our economy in order to not emit any CO2 and nothing would happen unless we get cooperation from everyone else because CO2 levels are cumulative. It's very much a prisoners dillema sort of game and I really don't think most 'environmentalists' really want to do what it takes.
Is that realistically why you think you were downvoted? That seems oversimplistic/self-pitying.
The reason you don't hear that anymore is not because there was no problem, but because the problem has been fixed by the implementation of the Montreal protocol. The ozon layer has been gradually recovering ever since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
> Or maybe it's the fact I'm Canadian and we generally push back against extremism, alarmism, most isms really.
How about other forms of alarmism, the reducing use of fossil fuels will destroy our way of life, collapse the economy, etc? I see a lot of people worried about "climate alarmism" but they never seem to be concerned about there own alarmsism.
> and I've heard that New York will be underwater and all the glaciers will be gone by 2020
Citation please? I see this claim frequently yet either no citations are provided or they rely on the readers lack of comprehension, memory or both. The alarmisim is probably in your head.
As for calling it "too acidic", that's fairly obviously more understandable for the lay reader than "not basic enough" would be.
https://www.rd.com/culture/predictions-that-didnt-come-true/
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/01/08/us/g...
For number 2, yes they revised the timeline, the glaciers are still retreating. Does an extrapolation on a long running process even count as being alarmist?
"...too acidic..." doesn't carry that same implication. On some scale, something is more acidic than optimum.
At least, that's the way I interpret the comments above. After reading the article, I knew exactly what was happening and didn't really think the title was click-bait, but can see how others might perceive it that way.
The headline is technically wrong, but the broad point, "things that we rely on are dying because of the changing pH of the ocean", is correct and meaningful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
The artivle you are refring to also says that the current rate of extinction is 10-100x that if previus mass extinctions. Unless you have some reason to believe we will manage to stop the ongoing ectinction event, then it will be a mass extinction by the time it is done; hence saying that we are in it.
So yeah, it's unlikely that humans could kill off all life on earth even if we keep trying to do so, but it's certainly possible that they'll cause their own destruction.
I think it's unlikely that human activity will lead to mass die-offs (of humans, we're already in a mass extinction event of animals) but our children and grandchildren may be in for a big lifestyle change.
The ocean Ph level doesn't have much to do with CO2 levels. It has everything to do with the rate of change of CO2 levels.
If you raise the CO2 level fast, the ocean turns acidic. If you raise it slowly, deposits of lime on the bottom of the ocean dissolve and Ph remains constant.
While CO2 has been much higher than the present, the rate of change is unprecedented.
Also evolution is a lot slower than you think. A change in Ph over millions of years could readily be adapted to by evolution. Over 20, not so much.
As for the crabs, some of them still develop hard shells. They'll reproduce and the soft-shelled ones won't. So whatever it is that causes harder shells will persist.
The fast mode is that if there is enough genetic diversity in the population that a subset have a combination of traits that suffices, natural selection quickly will reduce the genetic diversity and all of the survivors will have those traits. The advantage of sexual reproduction is that much of the genetic diversity is retained and gets to recombine in interesting ways allowing the next challenge to be addressed.
The slow mode is that if overcoming a barrier requires random mutations to produce new traits, it takes many generations for that to happen.
The current pH allows some to survive and others not to. But with projected future pH levels, none will be able to survive. Therefore natural selection will select out the entire population as there isn't enough time for a new set of traits to evolve.
Evolution in bacteria can therefore happen much more quickly than in larger organisms. Evolution in viruses is quicker still. (The flu that comes around each year is noticeably evolved from last year's one. In particular it is bred to avoid triggering immune system responses to recent flu variants.)
Crabs can't evolve at anything like the rate of bacteria.
The only news here is that they have actually been measured to be impacted at rates that they were predicted to be impacted. The overall conclusion of what will happen is not changed.
I think you presuppose climate change is a disaster in your extinction judgment rather than a transient response to human industrialization.
What I'm really worried about is that future brings us much more severe issues to deal with, which no multicellular life can survive. [1] The problem is quite urgent, and we only have 500M-1B years to deal with this.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
"In the 200-plus years since the industrial revolution began, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has increased due to humans burning fossil fuels (such as car emissions) and changing the way land is used (such as deforestation). During this time, the pH of surface ocean waters has fallen by 0.1 pH units. The pH scale, like the Richter scale, is logarithmic, so this change represents approximately a 30 percent increase in acidity."
https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-co...
The carbon dioxide isn't distributed evenly throughout the volume of the oceans. The pH change would be significantly slower if the whole volume could equilibrate instantaneously.
https://www.whoi.edu/know-your-ocean/ocean-topics/ocean-chem...
Currently, about half of the anthropogenic (human-caused) carbon dioxide in the ocean is found in the upper 400 meters (1,200 feet) of the water column, while the other half has penetrated into the lower thermocline and deep ocean. Density- and wind-driven circulation help mix the surface and deep waters in some high latitude and coastal regions, but for much of the open ocean, deep pH changes are expected to lag surface pH changes by a few centuries.
This is especially a problem for oceanic life because the vast majority of biological productivity and food people eat is also found in that upper portion. The euphotic zone where most photosynthesis takes place extends to about 200 meters below the surface.
Can't demand others to do it you won't do it first.
Edit: Removed hyperbole.
Saving the environment is not about individual choice, it's about fixing an unsustainable system. It's unsustainable because negative externalities are not effectively taxed/banned. Bad behaviour is rewarded financially which further drives change in the wrong direction.
Making it about individual choice, and therefore subject to "hypocrisy" is an effective way of preventing change. Divide and conquer. It's undeniably the pervasive narative in the media (but again this can be explained by systemic effects - where does the money come from? Who stands to benefit?).
You can demand new rules that come in for everyone at the same time. That's how tax rates change, how universal healthcare systems are established, how slavery is ended.
Societies are ultimately shaped by what people believe is possible.
Edit: Your comment has changed, but you're still expressing the conviction that everyone has to do things voluntarily. That's not true - only enough power has to come together to make and enforce laws. A high bar, but not as insurmountable.
This is exactly my point. If 100% of the people calling for climate change "rules/laws" have no ability to follow their own ideas now, what hope is there?
(I removed one sentence that I felt was a little inflammatory, it was extraneous)
have some self respect
If calcium carbonate-dense phytoplankton die off, the ocean gets fucked, and it'll no longer trap half the carbon dioxide generated on the planet, nor generate over half the planet's oxygen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification