Sixth Extinction - Ch. VI: The Sea Around Us

[Chris OConnor]

Sixth Extinction - Ch. VI: The Sea Around Us

Please use this thread to discuss the above-referenced chapter of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. You're also welcome to create your own threads if what you'd like to say doesn't necessarily pertain to a particular chapter.

[LanDroid]

Ocean covers seventy percent of the earth's surface, and everywhere that water and air come into contact there's an exchange. Gases from the atmosphere get absorbed by the ocean and gases dissolved in the ocean are released into the atmosphere. When the two are in equilibrium, roughly the same quantities are being dissolved as are being released. Change the atmosphere composition, as we have done, and the exchange becomes lopsided: more carbon dioxide enters the water than comes back out. In this way, humans are constantly adding CO2 to the seas, much as the vents do, but from above rather than below and on a global scale.
...Thanks to all this extra CO2, the pH of the oceans' surface waters has already dropped, from an average of around 8.2 to an average of around 8.1. Like the Richter scale, the pH scale is logarithmic, so even a small numerical difference represents a very large real-world change.
...Under what's know as a "business as usual" scenario, surface ocean pH will fall to 8.0 by the middle of this century, and it will drop to 7.8 by the century's end. At that point, the oceans will be 150 percent more acidic than they were at the start of the industrial revolution.
pgs 113-114

"Unfortunately, the biggest tipping point, the one at which the ecosystem starts to crash, is mean pH7.8, which is what we're expecting to happen by 2100, so that is rather alarming."
- Jason Hall-Spencer, marine biologist pg 118

We have discussed three ways to combat global warming.
1. Emission reductions.
2. Removing carbon from the atmosphere.
3. Increasing albedo (reflecting more sunlight) by creating artificial clouds.

Solutions 1 and 2 are viewed as too little / too late, so # 3 is the best solution to turn around climbing temperatures. However it seems # 3 does nothing to slow or reverse ocean acidification. If we focus on # 3 and place lower priority on 1 and 2, we might resolve the temperature problem, but eventually harm ocean life. So now it appears we must pursue all 3 solutions simultaneously and aggressively...

[LanDroid]

Nearly a quarter of the world's freshwater species are at risk of extinction: Report
Nearly a quarter of the world's freshwater species are at risk of extinction, according to new research. A detailed extinction assessment of more than 23,000 species of freshwater fauna by the International Union for Conservation of Nature identified major threats from pollution, dams, agriculture and invasive species, according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The species studied included fish, decapod crustaceans -- such as crabs, crayfishes and shrimps -- and odonates, such as dragonflies and damsel flies. About 24% of those species are at risk of extinction, Catherine Sayer, lead of the freshwater biodiversity team for the IUCN, told ABC News.

"That means there are high to extremely high risks of becoming extinct in the future," Sayer said. "That's quite an alarming percentage."

1/8/2025
https://abcnews.go.com/International/qu ... =117394855

Will the acidification of the ocean and threats to freshwater species motivate sportsmen, conservationists, and other humans who like to eat to turn this situation around?

[Robert Tulip]

We have discussed three ways to combat global warming.
1. Emission reductions.
2. Removing carbon from the atmosphere.
3. Increasing albedo (reflecting more sunlight) by creating artificial clouds.

Solutions 1 and 2 are viewed as too little / too late, so # 3 is the best solution to turn around climbing temperatures. However it seems # 3 does nothing to slow or reverse ocean acidification. If we focus on # 3 and place lower priority on 1 and 2, we might resolve the temperature problem, but eventually harm ocean life. So now it appears we must pursue all 3 solutions simultaneously and aggressively...

California spends ten billion dollars a year to subsidise renewable energy, supposedly to help address climate change. Fat lot of good that has done to cut fire risk, and any other perils of extreme weather. Hearts go out to the people of Los Angeles suffering a calamity that could have been prevented by sensible climate policies.

If instead California had invested in measures to directly cool the temperature of the Pacific Ocean, through technologies such as marine cloud brightening, as proposed by climate scientists and engineers for the last twenty years, a whole array of factors would have cut fire risk.

But the arrogant "follow the science" crowd know better than to follow the science. These hypocritical misanthropes conceal their immoral political hostility toward humanity behind false assertions that cutting emissions could mitigate climate change.

The only strategy that will actually mitigate climate change is direct climate cooling, combined with large scale carbon mining.

Locally, a cooler Pacific Ocean will reduce California's rainfall variability, the weather whiplash that saw heavy spring rain produce abundant vegetation only for summer and autumn drought to turn it into the ferocious tinder box that incinerated ten thousand homes this week.

90% of the kelp forests of the Santa Barbara Channel are gone due to hot water. This not only causes marine extinctions, it reduces the ocean tang, the biogenic aerosol dimethyl sulphide, which has a significant role in cloud and rain formation.

Globally, a cooler Pacific, combined with cooling in other oceans, would reverse the instability of the jet stream that caused the extreme Santa Ana winds that burnt LA.

We are now seeing the tragic consequences of the idiotic ideology of Emission Reduction Alone, preventing investment in research and development of practical cooling technologies.

It is time, too late in fact for the protection of Los Angeles, for a paradigm shift in climate policy, allowing ongoing emissions while recognising the security imperative to combine direct climate cooling technologies to reflect more sunlight back to space with large scale ocean based biomass restoration to mine the dangerous CO2 from the air and sea, with a goal to ramp up carbon mining to larger scale than world emissions.

Warming is caused by the 2.5 trillion tonnes of CO2 and other GHGs emitted since the industrial revolution. The Paris Accord can slow this growing by about one billion tonnes per year at best, a factor of 0.04%, functionally useless. Actually Paris has done nothing to slow global warming at a very dangerous time. Tipping points are in play that can only be slowed by solar geoengineering.

The whole Paris UN IPCC process is obsolete and corrupt, driven by renewable energy industry rent seeking as epitomised in California. President Trump is completely correct, if for wrong reasons, to take the US out of this bad agreement.

[LanDroid]

Very well stated. Climate deniers are very much against emission reductions and carbon mining, but they might "tolerate" them as merely corrupt financial boondoggles or payoffs to certain industries. However I can't imagine any way they would allow direct cooling through cloud formation, etc. Even though electing Donald Trump as President indicates the depth of our problems, I think you still underestimate the amount of paranoia in America. (Hope I'm not too repetitive.) In one ridiculous but small example of how botched their thinking processes can become, a few of them were convinced that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, would resurrect (or come out of hiding after 20 years) and join Trump as his VP candidate. They waited around for days at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where his father was assassinated, for RFK Jr. to return in glory. The main assumption necessary, that a resurrected JFK Jr. would have anything whatsoever to do with Trump, is also insane. Now imagine what zealots like that would do if we start "pumping poisons into the atmosphere to save the planet by killing humans." They might see this as an evil escalation of what airlines have been doing to spread poisons via contrails. Please understand direct cooling technology will not be deployed in the US.

Again, to address ocean acidificiation, CO2 levels must be reduced in the atmosphere, which direct cooling does not affect. Can we make it with emission reductions + carbon mining + some direct cooling from countries outside America? I hope so, but expect quite a few Americans simply do not care because they humbly believe the Biblical end of the world is coming in their lifetime.

[Robert Tulip]

Very well stated. Climate deniers are very much against emission reductions and carbon mining, but they might "tolerate" them as merely corrupt financial boondoggles or payoffs to certain industries. However I can't imagine any way they would allow direct cooling through cloud formation, etc.

There is a particularly serious insanity encapsulated in the mentality you describe, allowing boondoggles but rejecting simple improvement. People are blaming the LA fires on that mentality, albeit in a different context.

The task is to convince people that directly cooling the environment is a good thing. A starting point is to imagine if the Pacific Ocean off the California coast were cooler. This would make the whole situation much easier for fish and plants that are being devastated by heat. Cooling is good for biodiversity. It is also good for bringing more regular rain, from release of biogenic aerosols by seaweed, instead of switching between extremes of wet and dry. That cuts fire risk.

Cultivating seaweed is good for ecology and economy, so should be promoted. On that basis, we should also ask if there is anything we can do to make the ocean more benign for seaweed to grow. The best option, it turns out, is to make the clouds above the ocean reflect more sunlight by adding sea salt to the air in tiny particles. Sea salt spray has many excellent health benefits, including from its cooling effect on clouds.

I actually think this debate will turn around quickly. I expect a lot of influential people to change sides, and put sunlight reflection before decarbonisation as the main climate strategy, on grounds of timescale and cost and effectiveness to remove heat. That will isolate the conspiracy theorists and cut their influence.

Even though electing Donald Trump as President indicates the depth of our problems, I think you still underestimate the amount of paranoia in America. (Hope I'm not too repetitive.) In one ridiculous but small example of how botched their thinking processes can become, a few of them were convinced that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, would resurrect (or come out of hiding after 20 years) and join Trump as his VP candidate. They waited around for days at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where his father was assassinated, for RFK Jr. to return in glory.

These sort of cargo-culters are outliers. Paranoia is a delusional psychological disorder. But addressing a culture of mass paranoia is a different thing from individual counselling. Mass paranoia has to be treated with great sensitivity and care. It is not surprising that Americans are paranoid about energy security, since elite opinion for the last decades has sought to destroy it.

Energy security can be delivered by ongoing expansion of fossil fuel extraction, as Energy Secretary Chris Wright argues. The climate impact of this policy can be countered by sunlight reflection, developing new innovative technologies. That is the grand bargain needed to ensure not only energy security, but also climate security, food security and national security.

The concept of national security needs revision to accept climate risk, while rejecting the false solution of decarbonisation. This process needs to be conducted with far greater rigour than previous climate policies that assumed decarbonisation as the main goal. My view is that the policy outcome of such a security review should be to institute an immediate plan to restore the 3% of sunlight reflection lost in this century, as the primary global response to mitigate weather risk.

Energy transition should be seen within the primary context of energy security, alongside ongoing use of fossil fuels. Markets will gradually shift where economic and environmental concerns generate sufficient demand for renewable energy, without public subsidy. The main carbon agenda should be to work out how to mine more carbon from the air than we add by creating new mass commodity markets for carbon products such as physical infrastructure and soil. When carbon mining equals carbon addition, we reach net zero carbon emissions. This will happen a lot faster by ramping up the mining than ramping down the addition. Seaweed will be a major carbon mine.

The main assumption necessary, that a resurrected JFK Jr. would have anything whatsoever to do with Trump, is also insane. Now imagine what zealots like that would do if we start "pumping poisons into the atmosphere to save the planet by killing humans." They might see this as an evil escalation of what airlines have been doing to spread poisons via contrails.

Sea salt is not a poison. And these lunatics should be isolated as mad fringe nutters. But that will take a major shift in the public debate. The chemtrails conspiracy theory is false, but it brings the compelling emotional argument that global warming is a hoax so there is no need to change our lifestyle. When emotion fails to engage reason we get delusion.

Please understand direct cooling technology will not be deployed in the US.

I get how you might think that, especially after the Alameda County Hornet sea salt fiasco. The problem is that nobody has been able to put a sensible counter argument to the conspiracy theorists in the mass media, let alone within their echo chambers. Counter argument against the chemtrails conspiracy are rejected as word salad that comes across as ‘trust the UN to destroy your energy security’. A far better argument to undermine the chemtrail theorists among the general public can say okay, we won’t undermine fossil fuel use, but rebrightening the planet is a good thing, if we can do it safely, quickly and cheaply. We should work out a fully transparent and accountable way to govern the plans for testing and deployment of sunlight reflection methods.

Again, to address ocean acidification, CO2 levels must be reduced in the atmosphere, which direct cooling does not affect.

Direct cooling does slow the rise of CO2 by shortcircuiting various accelerating feedback processes that threaten to dump vast amounts of greenhouse gases from permafrost and forests. Cutting emissions does SFA to slow rising acidity. It is just not on the same order of magnitude. The Paris Accord would see a global fall of one billion tonnes of CO2 in annual world emissions as a triumph, but that is just 0.04% of the 2.5 trillion tonne total CO2 that humanity has added to the air, functionally nothing. Meanwhile marine life is under primary assault by heat.

Can we make it with emission reductions + carbon mining + some direct cooling from countries outside America? I hope so, but expect quite a few Americans simply do not care because they humbly believe the Biblical end of the world is coming in their lifetime.

Maybe ‘the Biblical end of the world’ is something completely different from what fundamentalists imagine? That is the implication of taking the Bible seriously rather than taking it literally.

I think that instituting solar geoengineering could become a signature policy for Donald Trump, if Chris Wright could be convinced to take it up. That would need a bunch of affected industries to lobby for this argument, such as insurance, banking, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, tourism, shipping and the military.