The Oceans pH Level Is Falling

[gsmith150]

Nice synopsis on the subject of global warming & related here:

Nice synopsis on the subject of global warming & related here:

For those of you that use Audible.com, there offering:The Modern Scholar: Global Warming, Global Threat (Unabridged)
Michael B. McElroy, is about an 8-hr lecture on contributing factors and results. It does a great job of illustrating how small changes cummulatively have major ramifications on the oceanic/atmospheric processes.
It is the best I've seen, & quite eye openning.
Greg in CT

Another interesting peice here on sea salps that obsorb CO2 is here: http://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php?article_id=74531028601
How sensitive are these to PH change?

 

[Kalkbreath]

I agree with your jelly salp link.
Now imagine how much more C02 would be absorbs and lock in place if the ocean still had the sealife it had prior to 1800?
The up wellings from deep Pacific out gassing is based on a few hundred year cycles. (a time scale begining in the little Ice age (1500s) to about 1900).
The Ocean bottom is hundreds of feet thick in Carbon sludge.
The collection of dead animal and plant life spanning a very long time. It represents 70 percent of the C02 on Earth.
little by little it erturns to the surface via these up wellings.

The oceans, by virtue of their enormous density and heat storage capacity, are the dominant influence on our climate. It is the heat budget and energy flows into and out of the ocean which largely determines what the global mean temperature of the surface atmosphere will settle to. These flows, especially evaporation, are quite capable of cancelling the slight effect of CO2. This is clearly evident in the tropics where there has been no temperature increase at all in spite of a 50% increase in CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases.

To single out a single variable, namely radiation through the atmosphere and associated greenhouse effect, as being the primary driving force of atmospheric and oceanic climate, is a simplistic and absurd way to view the complex interaction of forces between atmosphere, land, ocean and outer space.

Climate modeling has been concentrated mainly on the atmosphere with only a primitive representation of the ocean, some earlier models (upon which IPCC predictions were based) depicting it as a stagnant swamp. A more rational modelling approach would have been to model the oceans first, then adding the atmospheric factors. Instead, the evolution of climate models from earlier weather models has imposed an entirely atmospheric perspective on processes which are actually heavily dominated by the oceans.

The second most dominant influence is the Sun.
Most of the high and low temperture periods the Earth has experienced over recent recorded time correspond not with human emissions, but with clearly documented solar cycles. :

According to the World Data Centre for Greenhouse Gases (2003) "The high growth rates in 1983, 1987/88, 1994/1995, and 1997/1998 are associated with warm events of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The anomalously strong El Niño event in 1997/1998 brought about worldwide high increases in 1998. The exceptionally low growth rates in 1992, including negative values for northern high and mid-latitudes, were caused by low global temperatures following the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991." As this connection could be of great import (Kuo et al., 1990; Metzner, 1996), it is subjected to a detailed analysis.
http://www.john-daly.com/theodor/NINODECA.GIF
A closer look shows that the 179-year cycle in the Sun’s motion about the center of mass of the solar system fits the cyclic distribution. Jose (1965) has found patterns in the rate of change of the Sun’s orbital angular momentum that repeat at intervals of 178.8 years. In his pioneering computer analysis of the Sun’s motion he discovered that sunspots, too, follow a cycle of this length. According to Dansgaard et al. (1973), a period of 181 years, rather close to 179 years, is the paramount cyclic feature of the oxygen isotope profile of the Camp Century ice core. This indicates a connection with climate (Landscheidt, 1983-2003).

 

[Kalkbreath]

The hotter then normal Sun makes the Ocean swirl a bit more ...
and this upwelling outgasses more C02.
Humans remove most of the sealife and there is little left to absorb
the newly refound C02 , so it mixes with the atmosphere and we have a constantly increasing C02 level in the air.
Good thing the Ocean reabsorbs most of the additional heat back into the water.
Its one of the reasons Greenhouse Global Warming predictions made back in the 1990s have failed to produce the 1.5 temperature spike they predicted would be apon us by 2003.
Even if you believe the .4 temperature increase the ground readings have recorded over the past 200 years, its pretty amazing that with all we have done to the enviroment that the weather has not changed very much.
If the Sun continues to swirl the Oceans and C02 level continue to increase, I hope that we as a people begin to look beyond the simplistic version of Global warming anti industrialist project.

 

[HippieSmell]

Kalk.

I read a large chunk of the article poedag posted, and your right, it does discuss ocean outgassing. Which is exactly what your argument is about, yet you continue to ignore what it is saying.

We know where the increase in CO2 is coming from, it was discussed earlier, but you ignore that as well. We know because of the carbon isotopes. It's from the burning of fossil fuels, not ocean upwelling.

 

[Kalkbreath]

I still cant find where in this study they concluded that the current state of the oceans pH is lower today then at any time in the past 150 years? Did I miss something?
Under what basis does the Author of the original headline;

Report: World's Oceans Have High Acidity Levels
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By Dan Vergano
USA Today
07/06/06 8:07 AM PT

According to research sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, oceans naturally absorb carbon dioxide from the air, which produces carbonic acid in seawater. As more carbon dioxide resulting from the burning of fossil fuels is absorbed into the sea, a natural balance is becoming overwhelmed, threatening many sea creatures' livelihoods.

Do you think the average reader will understand that the writer is talking about the years 2100?
May I say that the reefers on this board actualy have more data in support of the notion that corals can survive just fine under a 8.1 pH (most hobbyists using C02 fed Kalk reactors find a resulting lowered tank pH ) The silly tests in this report resulted in not much of any findings concerning calcification and additional C02...... But what it did show (and the researchers failed to notice) is that the corals survived the doomsday senerio just fine.
They increased the C02 concentrations to that of their projected year 2100 and the corals did just fine.( of course they didnt report on any of the other wtare paramenters like Mag., Stronium, etc.
But I doubt the researchers had the reef tank skilles of your average Reefs dot org. hobbyists.

Testing the response of calcifying organisms to increased
CO2 concentrations has primarily been conducted
under controlled, laboratory conditions. Most
of these experiments have also been conducted over
short periods (days to weeks), and otherwise have
not been designed to detect adaptation or acclimation.

Even the wild corals on the reefs are showing no signs of lowered calcification due to increased C02 emmissions,

calcification records from corals and
other organisms should show a decrease in calcification
over the past century. While some individual calcification
records from massive corals do reveal a decrease
in calcification rate over the past century, on
average they do not (Lough and Barnes, 1997, 2000),

Also the Porities Core data used in this study showed that even if researchers were to find that the oceans pH has dipped a bit , the core study found that the Porities have lived through several lowered pH events just fine.( back before the industrial age)

a recent analysis of boron isotopes in a massive coral
from the western Coral Sea provided multi-century,
annually resolved reconstructions of pH (Pelejero et
al., 2005) (Figure 4â€"œ5b). The signal appeared to reflect
variations in ocean circulation and flushing raterelated to natural, approximately 50-year climatic oscillations.
The variations of approximately 0.3 pH
units equate to a variation in Ωarag of approximately
3â€"œ4.5, but had no apparent impact on coral extension
or calcification rates. The authors concluded
that this Porites coral was well adapted to maintain
its calcification over the natural range of variability.

Finding inside these Porities that the pH of the ocean in 1700s was lower then it is today, didnt seem to damper these researchers position on pre industrial age climates.
If only SUV drivers can lower the oceans pH , then what the heck caused the oceans pH to dip in 1700? and not in 2005?


This entire report is based on "what if" What if the atmosphere C02 levels double in the next 100 years.
The levels doubled during the past 100 years and Guess what?

Not much!

 

[HippieSmell]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7830447#post7830447 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Kalkbreath
Finding inside these Porities that the pH of the ocean in 1700s was lower then it is today, didnt seem to damper these researchers position on pre industrial age climates.
If only SUV drivers can lower the oceans pH , then what the heck caused the oceans pH to dip in 1700? and not in 2005?


This entire report is based on "what if" What if the atmosphere C02 levels double in the next 100 years.
The levels doubled during the past 100 years and Guess what?

Not much!

Nobody said there weren't natural variations in CO2 levels in the past. But, the CURRENT increase is largely due to the burning of fossil fuels, as shown through isotope studies.

Saying that because doubling CO2 levels in the past didn't have 'much effect', doesn't mean that doubling the levels again won't have an impact. That is a poor argument.

 

[billsreef]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7830447#post7830447 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Kalkbreath
This entire report is based on "what if" What if the atmosphere C02 levels double in the next 100 years.
The levels doubled during the past 100 years and Guess what?

Not much!

Think about that a bit more. Let's just 100 as a good easy number to use for a starting point. If you double that you now have 200. Maybe not much in the grand scheme of things, but lets double that again. Now you have 400, wich is 300 more than your "normal" base level. Double that again and you have 800, which is now 700 over your base level. Obviously doubling things like that will become a problem. That is readily apparent if you look at some estuaries and pollution problems. A little bit of sewage didn't cause problems, so we dump more and more. Now we have estuaries that can and do go completely eutrophic and dead that once were clean and productive estuaries...and that has occured well within our lifetimes.

 

[samtheman]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7833385#post7833385 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by billsreef
Think about that a bit more. Let's just 100 as a good easy number to use for a starting point. If you double that you now have 200. Maybe not much in the grand scheme of things, but lets double that again. Now you have 400, wich is 300 more than your "normal" base level. Double that again and you have 800, which is now 700 over your base level. Obviously doubling things like that will become a problem. That is readily apparent if you look at some estuaries and pollution problems. A little bit of sewage didn't cause problems, so we dump more and more. Now we have estuaries that can and do go completely eutrophic and dead that once were clean and productive estuaries...and that has occured well within our lifetimes.

So because of our sewage, you think we should shut down our power industry, and live in the dark without any evidence except that which is derived from unverified models. Think about that a little more, will you?

 

[billsreef]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7833577#post7833577 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by samtheman
So because of our sewage, you think we should shut down our power industry, and live in the dark without any evidence except that which is derived from unverified models. Think about that a little more, will you?

Now where on earth did I go and say that

 

[HippieSmell]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7833577#post7833577 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by samtheman
So because of our sewage, you think we should shut down our power industry, and live in the dark without any evidence except that which is derived from unverified models. Think about that a little more, will you?

I think Bill's comment was to illustrate the fact that ecosystems can sometimes handle pollutants with little effect, then rapidly deteriorate. Nothing, and I think I can safely say nothing, is perfectly linear in biology, ecology, etc. Things often seem to be going along at a steady rate, then BAM, everything is out of whack. It makes things difficult because everything seems to be fine and it lulls you into complacency right up until it's too late.

 

[billsreef]

Hippie nailed it :thumbsup:

 

[affan]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7821563#post7821563 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by billsreef
After all, that deep water was once surface water before it got chilled at the poles and sunk to the bottom to recirculate.

Is that a powerhead/chiller combined into one? If so, where can I purhcase this?

 

[Kalkbreath]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7832340#post7832340 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by HippieSmell
Nobody said there weren't natural variations in CO2 levels in the past. But, the CURRENT increase is largely due to the burning of fossil fuels, as shown through isotope studies.
.

Well, isotope studies merly indicate that fossil fuel CO2 mixes in the air. I dont think nayone is claiming that more fossil fuel is not being burned today compared to pre industrial age.
Burn more oil and the result will be more C12 isotopes in the air displacing the normal ratio.
The isotope studies do not indicate that the anthropogenic emissions are responsible for increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration [indeed only some 5% of the present atmospheric CO2 content is of anthropogenic origin. The data simply found that of the current anthropongenic C02 C12 is up a tiny bit.
Now that does show tiny change in the ratio of C13 vrs. C12 isotopes, but it hardly explains where the additional new 98.5% C02 is coming from?

you should have a look at IPCC's SAR Technical Summary p.15,

stating "Within 30 years about 40-60% of the CO2 currently released to the atmosphere is removed"[/qoute]
Oil reserves will eventually become depleted by the mid 21st century, leaving only coal and gas as the active fossil fuels.
Even if C02 levels begin to approach 600 in fifty years, We humans will have already been forced to find alternative fuels.

Have you found where in the NOAA study they found

World's Oceans to Have High Acidity Levels?
as claimed by the the press?

 

[billsreef]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7836728#post7836728 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by affan
Is that a powerhead/chiller combined into one? If so, where can I purhcase this?

Indeed

Just to use the Atlantic Ocean has an example. We have the Gulf Stream bringing nice warm salty water north, where between evaporation along the way and cooling, it becomes saltier and denser and starts to sink. Eventually it sinks all the to the depths of the ocean and becomes the southward current known as the North Atlantic Deep Water where that water know returns southward and returns to the surface during upwelling events and as it warms in the south. This system is also referred to as the ocean conveyor, moderation global temperatures by transferring massive quantities if heat around the worlds oceans. The warm water going to the poles keeps northern areas from getting too cold, and the return of cold water keeps the equatorial regions from getting too hot.

 

[Kalkbreath]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7833385#post7833385 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by billsreef
Think about that a bit more. Let's just 100 as a good easy number to use for a starting point. If you double that you now have 200. Maybe not much in the grand scheme of things, but lets double that again. Now you have 400, wich is 300 more than your "normal" base level. Double that again and you have 800, which is now 700 over your base level. Obviously doubling things like that will become a problem. That is readily apparent if you look at some estuaries and pollution problems. A little bit of sewage didn't cause problems, so we dump more and more. Now we have estuaries that can and do go completely eutrophic and dead that once were clean and productive estuaries...and that has occured well within our lifetimes.

I would like to point out that , we are most likely past the halfway point in terms of fossil fuels. It took burning fifty percent or more of the earths petroleum reserves to increase the C02 level by 200 points.
If we only have 40 % of the oil remaining and the 60% we already burned represented 200 points, then there is only 150 points worth of C02 left to release (in the remaining 40%.)
Thats whats wrong with projected future increases that are based on fossil fuel emissions. There simply is not enough fuel left in the earth to continue at the same pace through out the next 100 years.

Combined this with the fact that most of the C02 thats in the air right now will be absorbed in into some sink or another (30year half life of C02) and what we have is an impossible senerio in the idea that the atmosphere can reach a doubling point.

Yet you wont find any discussion of the NOAA or IPCC's papers juxtaposing how much fossil fuel it would take to bump the C02 in the atmosphere by another 500 point. now will you?

Wonder why?I

 

[billsreef]

Kalk,

You seem to be forgetting about other fossil fuels like coal, which burn very dirty as compared to oil. Also I don't see where you are accounting for natural gas. The other thing is your theory of all the produced CO2 getting tied into sinks is making a very large assumpution that those CO2 sinks have infinitate capacity.

 

[sherm71tank]

Like a sandbed! Those are infinite!

 

[billsreef]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7838478#post7838478 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by sherm71tank
Like a sandbed! Those are infinite!

Yup, we all know sand beds in our tanks are infinite sinks. Therefore since the worlds oceans have vast sand beds, they also must be infinite sinks

 

[sherm71tank]

You are a bad man!!!

 

[billsreef]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7838583#post7838583 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by sherm71tank
You are a bad man!!!

I just expanded on your thought