Comments on: Warming up, turning sour, losing breath

By: Warming up, turning sour, losing breath: A Call for Dialogue | Dialogue Earth

Mon, 02 May 2011 17:59:50 +0000

[...] a recent blog post at Discover Magazine, Warming up, turning sour, losing breath, Carl Zimmer outlines some of the threats to the ocean and it’s related ecosystems posed by [...]

By: Warming | TunaTuna

Warming | TunaTuna — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 23:58:07 +0000

[...] Posted on April 29, 2011 by stjudetuna The world’s oceans face multiple threats, explains Carl Zimmer for Discover. “That extra carbon (9.2 billion tons in 2009 alone) is acidifying the ocean, warming it, [...]

By: Jim Richardson

Jim Richardson — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 04:48:27 +0000

Excellent and important argument. Two minor quibbles:

“That extra carbon (9.2 billion tons in 2009 alone)…” It may be worth emphasising that this is the mass of just the carbon; emissions are often quantified as mass of CO2, which is 44/12 = 3.666… times more.

“As organic matter breaks down, it reacts more with oxygen that’s rich in carbon.” This could be better phrased: oxygen being an element cannot be rich in carbon, or indeed have any carbon in it at all:-)

By: Matt B.

Matt B. — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 22:41:25 +0000

Great article, very informative and clear. A typo though: the paragraph after the charts has “termpature”. The fact that a 0.1 change in pH means ~30% change on a linear scale made me realize that the 10th root of 10 is approximately the cube root of 2, (since 10^3 ~= 2^10).

By: Lucilia Cuprina

Lucilia Cuprina — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 19:00:08 +0000

Ocean acidification is trivially staunched, including iron supplementation in the Southern Ocean to promote photosynthesis. The process removes 100+ megatonnes/year of particularly nasty industrial waste, too. Read the literature,

Chemical & Engineering News 88(48) 4 (2010)
(C&EN, 29 November 2010
Center of page

Every unknown hazard has at least two unknown solutions. Science plus capitalism is a wondrous coupling. Enviro-whinerism makes virtue of failure. The worse the cure the better the treatment – and the more that is required.

By: Daniel J. Andrews

Daniel J. Andrews — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 19:34:01 +0000

Interactions within interactions. It is a good lesson not to isolate one anomaly and then claim it overturns the whole. A hypothetical example (may not even be a possible example*): one of the human fingerprints of warming is less oxygen in the atmosphere as more CO2 is burned. However, if the ocean is giving up its oxygen faster than it is being depleted in the air, oxygen content in the air would rise or be stable and some people would claim those silly scientists are wrong again.

Along those lines, there may also be more O2 released from the ocean due to an increase in plankton (but that may be countered by an increase in decaying biomass at a later date), and this would also highlight the need to inspect those anomalies carefully–they may not only disprove a pet idea, but actually strengthen the support for the body of work that already counters a pet idea.

btw, glad you clarified the “acidification” term…I’ve seen a number of people claiming the ocean isn’t acidifying because the pH was above 7. A case of…

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

*I have no idea if O2 released from the ocean would counter decreases in the atmosphere, or how this changes in local areas (e.g. the triple whammy spots highlighted), or with various events (El Nino, La Nina), or how O2 is distributed in the atmosphere and where it is measured, hence the “hypothetical”.

edit to add: the article isn’t behind a paywall either. It’s free. Very nice.