Ocean acidification, often called the “evil twin” of the climate crisis, is caused when carbon dioxide is rapidly absorbed by the ocean, where it reacts with water molecules leading to a fall in the pH level of the seawater.
It’s not so much acidification as a reduction in alkalinity – we’re still not crossing the 7 neutral boundary.
found that ocean acidification’s “boundary” was also reached about five years ago.
So we’re all dead already then?
It found that by 2020 the average ocean condition worldwide was already very close to – and in some regions beyond – the planetary boundary for ocean acidification. This is defined as when the concentration of calcium carbonate in seawater is more than 20% below preindustrial levels.
And how valid is that as a target?
Now, me being as I am, I’d assume that we’ve been here – on a planetary basis that is – before. Those past periods of warming and high CO2. So, what happened to the shellfishes when it did?
They mutate into giant kraken.
Is that what you want ?
Cos that’s what you’ll get !
Telling people that adding carbon dioxide to sea water makes it closer to neutral isn’t scary though is it?
Also, Grok tells me that CO2 levels have definitely been 7000-8000 ppm and possibly 10,000 ppm in the past, yet somehow the planet is still here…….
Some years ago, I downloaded a spreadsheet of pH values for the world’s seas.
The data was very fragmentary and I tried to derive decadal trends from points that were relatively close together . The problem was that pH values are very localised. Just a few minutes on the globe gave radically different values. Location ( IE where on the globe ), seasons, proximity to land and habitation, volcanoes, sea life, kraken prevalence, all sorts of stuff affects the figures.
Where is their control ? How are they measuring this ‘acidification’ ?
How did the oceans get to be so alkaline in the first place, I wonder. You’d think something so vast would tend to neutral over time. Perhaps all the acid ended up in Venus
pH levels change on a daily or hourly basis as the tide goes in and out… All the Acidification bollox is just that…
Thanks Otto. most interesting that, volcanoes, what comes out of river deltas, erosion all seem to drive pH up, but local and regional variation massive as you say
Otto @ 7.46, I have always thought the use of Mauna Loa as the reference site for measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide a trifle odd. I mean, anyone suggesting we use one single place as the definitive measure of global temperature would be laughed at, but for some reason everyone accepts it………
“Climate science” is what gave backs of fag packets a good name…
A lot of people don’t have a handle on just how big the sea is. If it sucks up CO2, it’s bad. If it coughs up CO2, that’s bad too. Meanwhile, we are spending billions on CCS which involves believing it can be done and paying money to a bunch of chancers last known for providing the Emperor with clothing so fine it couldn’t be seen.
In fact bits of the sea are sucking CO2 while other bits cough it up. If global warming was indeed increasing the temperature the ocean would be releasing CO2 a lot more, and it would go basic, wouldn’t it? That’s not happening according to this story.
Any idea that scientists can actually observe the CO2 cycle is hubristic, they haven’t much of an idea.
“So, what happened to the shellfishes when it did?”
They thrived in their trillions and built massive chalk cliffs.
There’s a handy graph of past CO2 levels (a third of the way down the page) here: https://geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html Do note the estimate of uncertainty marked in faintly.
Molluscs evolved in the Cambrian. Lots of carbonate around to build their shells from.
I’m not sure what they mean by “when the concentration of calcium carbonate in seawater is more than 20% below preindustrial levels”. When CO2 dissolves in water, you get a buffer reaction that converts carbonic acid to bicarbonate ions to carbonate ions. The more CO2 is dissolved, the more carbonate ions you get. Calcium ions, Sodium ions, carbonate ions and so on are of course all floating around free, not hooked up to one another.
They might be referring to the carbonate compensation depth or lysocline – the depth at which dead mollusc shells dissolve in seawater. Solid Calcium carbonate is fairly insoluble near the surface of the ocean. As the shells sink, the aragonite dissolves first, then the calcite. The solvation reaction uses up CO2, so the rate at which it happens depends on CO2 levels in the depths. The carbonate compensation depth is currently roughly 4.2 km down. It was at a shallower depth in past times of high CO2.
As with temperature, there is a wide range of naturally occurring conditions on Earth with life adapted to live in most of it. As conditions change, the regions move around, and life moves with it. So average temperature varies from about -10 C in Canada and Siberia to +30 C in Eritrea and Somalia about 6,000 miles apart. So temperature varies about 1 C per 150 miles on average. If (hypothetically) the temperature everywhere went up 2 C over a century, habitats would shift about 300 miles towards the poles, or 3 miles/year. That’s the difference between London (av temp 11.3 C) and Edinburgh (av temp 9.3 C). The temperature wouldn’t rise uniformly, though. The equator is kept at the same temperature by cloud feedback, and the temperature would instead become more uniformly warm nearer the poles.
Everything would survive. It would just move and adapt. And the same I’m sure is true of ocean pH. You might get shellfish moving up to shallower waters, but it wouldn’t disappear. A lot of the doom-saying extrapolations are based on assuming that nothing adapts – as if they were saying that if you move from Bristol to Lisbon, say, without changing the clothes you’re wearing you’ll die of heatstroke. Or that farmers on moving from Bristol to Lisbon (av temp 17.5 C) would try to grow the same crops they grew back home, and so fail.
@Addolff anyone suggesting we use one single place as the definitive measure of global temperature
But that’s exactly what the warmidiots do when they quote “average global temperature” but without specifying the place. The difference in recorded temperature worldwide every day is between 90C to 120C depending on the season – northern summer usually has the biggest range.
The whole projected temperature increase is pretty much the same as going from here in the south-facing room to the dining room which points north. A feat I manage without even changing clothes.
NiV: Greenies are the most conservative people on the planet, despite them seeing themselves as ‘progressive’.
As for CO2, there must be far more dissolved in the oceans than exists in the atmosphere, so any attempts at carbon capture at practical levels are doomed to fail. At the maximum rate of removal that is economically practical, it will come straight back out of the oceans, probably at a similar rate.
So I asked Grok to confirm what I recall reading some years ago, and Grok spake thus:
“Yes, it’s roughly correct. About 93-96% of Earth’s carbon dioxide (CO₂) is stored in the oceans, primarily as dissolved inorganic carbon (e.g., bicarbonate and carbonate ions). The exact percentage varies slightly depending on the source and methodology, but the oceans hold the vast majority of the planet’s CO₂, with the atmosphere containing about 2%, and the rest in terrestrial ecosystems and soils. The ocean acts as a massive carbon sink, absorbing and storing CO₂ from the atmosphere.”
So seas “suddenly” absorbing C02 and having an acid trip? Tripe!
And about 95% of Earth’s heat is in the oceans which are heated primarily by solar radiation NOT the atmosphere, although the latter can transfer a small amount (about 10%) to the seas.
Churning within the oceans carrying heat from the depths to the surface and vice versa mean constant exchange between sea and atmosphere which also results in constant exchange of CO2 between sea and atmosphere.
So boiling oceans due to global warming = tripe!
Rocky Mountains.
The Gas Laws have been well understood by anyone not a “climate scientist” since the early nineteenth century.
Reducing CO2 emissions from industry, transport, pouring concrete foundations for windmills, etc will have zero effect on the atmosphere because the oceans will outgas CO2 to maintain the equilibrium.
It’s all a fool’s errand but some people are making money from it. They are crooks.
@JohnB – So the best artificial carbon capture scheme humans could devise would be to make West Oxon a big reservoir. Or there ain’t no climate emergency and the council should repeal their declaration of one.
This is a very enlightening graph of global temperatures.
I was reading an article last night about how hurricanes churned the ocean to greater depths than previously realized. This facilitated plankton blooms by bringing nutrients to the surface. That in turn sequesters more carbon as the plankton die and drop carbonates on the sea floor.
One more unknown feedback loop buffering CO2 in the atmosphere. There are more of these out there. No wonder climate models never work.
“It’s all a fool’s errand but some people are making money from it. They are crooks.”
Yes, there are people making money on climate mania, but you miss the bigger picture, Phillip. Soros/Schwab aren’t driving it to make money, they are driving it to destroy money, to wipe out the middle class in the West, the only barrier to their One Global Government.
Mandated heat pumps, EVs, etc, are meant to soak the middle.
“As for CO2, there must be far more dissolved in the oceans than exists in the atmosphere, so any attempts at carbon capture at practical levels are doomed to fail. At the maximum rate of removal that is economically practical, it will come straight back out of the oceans, probably at a similar rate.”
Nope. It’s currently out of equilibrium, so about half the CO2 generated each year by industry is currently being absorbed into the oceans. The oceans contain about 50 times the CO2 of the atmosphere, so it has plenty of capacity, but because it all has to go through the surface layer it’s a slow process.
The oceans are, in effect, a massive carbon capture scheme sucking up about half the carbon dioxide emitted. If we stopped emitting, or reduced net emissions with a bit of carbon capture, they would continue to absorb it until it reached equilibrium, which would be when roughly 2% of all the CO2 we emitted was still in the atmosphere. Only if you reduced it below that to pre-industrial levels would the ocean start releasing it again.
All this is, of course, making the common assumption that the only thing that has changed is the CO2 emitted by industry. Stuff like invasive species spread around the world and affecting the processing of CO2 in the oceans could conceivably also have a profound effect. We just don’t know. The oceanic carbon cycle is hugely complex and poorly understood, as yet.
I am confused as to how this is an issue.
Calcium carbonate is formed from calcium,. Oxygen, and CO2. How do high CO2 levels *reduce* the amount of CaCO3?
‘Ocean acidification, often called the “evil twin” of the climate crisis’
Because both are communist bullshit. Both are LOL ridiculous.
“Calcium carbonate is formed from calcium,. Oxygen, and CO2. How do high CO2 levels *reduce* the amount of CaCO3?”
CaCO3 + H2O + CO2 => Ca(++) + 2HCO3(-)
The promised global warming and polar melting didn’t show up, so they switched to ocean “acidification.”
“The promised global warming and polar melting didn’t show up”
Polar melting was actually predicted to arrive around 2080 by the IPCC models. If polar melting was happening earlier than that due to global warming, it would be a falsification of the models.
Arctic sea ice did reduce starting in 1990. (And stopped shrinking in 2006. See https://data.seaiceportal.de/relaunch/extent.php#gallery_n-1 .) When a small number of especially ignorant activist scientists, disreputable weasels even by the standards of climate science, saw the arctic ice declining, they leapt to the conclusion that it must be a sign of global warming, and went to the media, predicting that it would all be gone sometime around 2013 ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7139797.stm ). Other climate scientists pointed out that it was actually due to the direction of the prevailing winds in the arctic – when they blow one way, they jam the pack ice up against the coast of Siberia – when they blow the other way, the pack ice is blown out through the Greenland strait into warmer waters futher south. It’s to do with the locations of polar high and low pressure systems, that vary with the ‘northern annular mode’ and related climate oscillations. Wind direction is weather, not climate. People deeply into the subject did spot them saying it, but somehow the media didn’t get to hear about that. Maybe they didn’t say it very loudly, or maybe the media were selectively deaf.
The concern over ocean acidification started in 1973-1974 with a paper by Fairhall (Fairhall, A. W.: Accumulation of fossil CO2 in the atmosphere and the sea, Nature, 245, 20–23, 1973). So that was well before the arctic ice decline in 1990-2006.
When you say “they”, do you mean the media?
AND, less Arctic sea ice would be GOOD! just like actual global warming would be GOOD!
Well Gamecock, it can get bloody hot in Queensland in summer.
But I have to admit that what I should do is buy an airconditioner!!