Ocean acidification takes place when increased levels of carbon dioxide in marine waters makes the water more acidic than normal. People tend to think of “climate change” as simply a synonym for “global warming, because climate change includes global warming, and because the most prominent political debates concern global warming. However, ocean acidification is part of the overall climate change that’s taking place as a result of human industrialization of the planet. Just as global warming is caused by carbon dioxide emissions, so is ocean acidification.
The most commonly known ecological impact of ocean acidification is reduction in the growth of shells and skeletons of animals living in the ocean. Animals like diatoms, shellfish and corals use carbon from the water around them to construct the hard parts of their bodies, and that process is hampered when the water is more acidic.
Recent research indicates that ocean acidification can also interfere with animals’ neurological processes, leaving them less able to engage in intelligent reactions to the stimulus around them. Clownfish in waters with increased acidity, for example, were found to wander away from their protective anemones more often, making them more vulnerable to predation.
Another new study, conducted by scientists from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, has found that ocean acidification isn’t only being produced by atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions. Massive amounts of algae bloom and die quickly, associated with runoff pollution carried to the oceans by rivers, create what are called “dead zones” – areas that have practically no animal life within them because there is almost no oxygen in the water. The NOAA scientists found that these dead zones are also a significant source of carbon dioxide in the water, adding to ocean acidification.
Oceana has also released a report, based on an analysis of the likely impact of ocean acidification on the economies of the nations of the Earth. Not surprisingly, it’s the world’s island nations that are likely to suffer most. Of the ten nations most vulnerable to the effect of ocean acidification, only two are continental nations. This top 10 list reads:
1. Cook Islands
2. New Caledonia
3. Turks and Caicos Islands
4. Comoros
5. Kiribati
6. Aruba
7. Faroe Islands
8. Pakistan
9. Eritrea
10. Madigascar
It’s pretty clear by now, with all the climate change effects just beginning to make themselves known (or felt) with much more on the way (since we humans don’t learn from our mistakes or change ANYTHING), that we’re basically going to go extinct in short order. If you factor in the financial calamity we have going globally, it only comes about in less time. If perchance the electrical grid fails, we’ll have a bunch of Fukushimas right here at home (mainly on the east coast) to contaminate everything with radioactivity – including US! (And if this happened globally by an EMP from the sun, there are about 400 nuclear power plants that would go Fuk on us.)
Bright future, eh wot?!
Asserting that we’re “going to go extinct in short order” is counter-productive and, I must say, utterly irresponsible. First off, it’s a wild, emotional, and uninformed speculation, not based on any hard science of which I’m aware and certainly not supported by any legitimate scientific authorities to my knowledge. Second, because it is so obviously an hysterical response, it only causes people to tune out, whereby they miss the rational and scientifically solid message that we ARE in for major social and economic disruptions if we don’t quickly clean up our act and begin serious and significant remediation efforts.
As a young man, I was convinced that neither I nor civilization would survive my 35th birthday, but I kept on crusading and trying to make a positive contribution anyway. Now I’m 60. I’m sure glad I didn’t piss away my life and my youthful energy just running around in circles flailing my hands and screaming OH MY GOD WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!
Well, Bill, you’re entitled to your opinion, but the hard science tells another story.
i’ve always thought, like you, that something was terribly wrong with the way the world of humanity was carrying on and, like you, tried to make the best of it. i’m still working on all kinds of social and political stuff (and we’re about the same age) like anti-fracking (attended rallies, signed petitions, wrote congressman and state legislators, etc.), GMO foods (ditto), voter I.D. legislation (this year i have an active MoveOn petition to not enforce the law here in PA ), mountaintop coal removal (attended lectures as well as all the above), do a lot of community awareness with a weekly group in West Chester and support locally grown food (beside my own garden). So it’s not that i’ve given up.
The only difference is that i can read the writing on the wall as well as the journals and articles that point to runaway climate change impacting humanity in a very harsh way going forward (since we failed to heed the warnings for DECADES and didn’t change a single thing that caused the problem in the first place). We’re on our way out all right and it can happen in a relatively short amount of time. Already we’re seeing food shortages, long-term drought, flooding, more (and more intense) storms, and currently earthquake and volcanic activity is way up.
Fukushima and Chernobyl have given us a clear picture of this disaster prone method of providing energy, while coal fired power plants continue to dump megatons of CO2 and other pollution into the atmosphere (not to mention all the vehicles that use fossil fuels and do the same) which will only continue to make matters worse for a long time.
Most, if not all of the rivers in the world are polluted with our run-off and by-products (including pharmaceuticals) and the ocean is becoming more and more acidic, overfished, and trashed with plastic and toxins. We’ve fouled our fishbowl and there’s no going back (http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100728/full/news.2010.379.html).
The air is polluted with fine particulates from the above mentioned power plants and brake dust, yet chemtrails are visible every day over much of the world’s skies – more pollution in the form of microscopic particles of aluminum, strontium, and barium – which fall to the ground, get in to the soil layer and ground water via rain and as a result many trees are suffering and dying (from the inside out), not to mention what we’re breathing in and the long-term effects of doing so. If that weren’t bad enough, we’ve gone so far as to cause the release of methane geysers from melting permafrost, lakes and seas in the arctic that pump even more (and worse) green-house gas into the atmosphere this past year.
Underlying all of this is, of course, is overpopulation. We exceded the carrying capacity of the planet a long time ago, but we continue to add humans every day – enen more resource consumers when we’re at peak everything now.
Here’s a book you can start off with that will explain a lot of this in more detail.
(Prof.) William Catton, Jr. has written a few books – Overshoot was in the 80′s, and his latest, Bottleneck , Humanity’s Impending Impasse (this one i highly recommend). i have links to many articles and lectures by knowlegeable people and climate scientists (as well as physicists, biochemists and others) if you want them.
The chance to do anything to mitigate against any or all of this was decades ago, not, as you state “if we don’t quickly clean up our act.” Because we haven’t “cleaned up our act” and we aren’t doing so now either. It gets worse every year. More species extinction, more pollution, less resources (including potable water and top soil among others), and more people.
i’m not hysterical about it, Bill – i’m profoundly disappointed that we’re so ignorant, lazy and self-serving that we didn’t change our ways in time to avoid this next scenario and care not for what would have been our future generations. i’m goin’ down fightin’ though (hopefully, like you) and sincerely hope i’m wrong about all this. So far the evidence isn’t encouraging.