California oceans rising in acidity at alarming rate, study finds

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-16/ocean-acidification-california

by Elof • 7 years ago

91 37 7 years ago

Thorentis• 7 years ago

I wonder if instead of desalination plants, there exists "de-acidification" plants that can in turn use the acid for electricity generation or something like that?

Whenever I see these articles, unfortunately my first thought is "we're too far gone, we can't turn around now" in terms of climate change. But! I think that instead of trying to reverse the situation (for instance, by convincing the largest carbon emitters like China to stop - which they won't), we should try to make use of the situation.

Too much carbon being released? Free carbon! How can we use it to make something else / convert it to something else? Too much acid in the ocean? How can we extract it and use it for something? Rising temps? How can we make use of this to grow crops that need warmer environments, or use it for better solar generation, or use thermal power generation in these areas. Our best hope it to adapt to the new norm rather than fight a losing battle. I know it's fatalistic, but I think we will last longer as a species if we adopt this approach instead.

changoplatanero• 7 years ago

Unfortunately the "free carbon" is in the form of a very dilute gas that is very hard to do anything useful with.

bamboozled• 7 years ago

I think this is the right attitude really. What else is there ?

It’s the same way I see politicians doing nothing helpful, people are just going to have to work around them to get the situation under control or at least make use of it.

lopmotr4• 7 years ago

No. Before investing money in solving a problem, you have to at least have some estimate of how severe the problem is, typically measured in dollars. We don't have that. Instead, we have people shouting "the end is neigh", which isn't actually a reason to take any action. I think the right approach is to do nothing about it until we have predictions. Then compare the cost of coping with the problem to the costs of preventions.

powowow• 7 years ago

I think our best hope is a multi-pronged approach that includes reusing the output (as you suggest), as well as reducing the output. This has a dramatically better chance of overall success than any single-pronged approach.

As such, I heartily endorse your 'how do we make use of that?' attitude, but I also will never agree with your assertion that our best hope is to accept it as a new norm, or to accept it's a losing battle.

It's just like how in business you want to get new customers, but you also want to reduce costs. Any company that chooses to care about only one of those things is doomed in the long-run.

NeedMoreTea• 7 years ago

Trouble is, rising acidity at alarming rates is still only a 0.21 decline in pH over a 100 year period. Whilst that might be more than enough to upset no end of shelled animals and other issues. A de-acidifcation plant faces the same issue as carbon capture and storage away from the huge emitters -- you're going to have to process a colossal volume to capture enough of the pollutant you're removing.

While we're at it, how much overhead do we add to global power requirements for all these de-acidification plants, desalination plants and CCS contraptions? How about we stop pouring it in the top and just fucking decarbonise, and leave all those tar sands alone... :)

AstralStorm2• 7 years ago

It is not enough still. But processing such huge volumes with current technology is out of reach.

Might be easier to devise a biotech solution, but messing with ecosystems is quite risky nonetheless. An example would be putting carbon fixing bacteria or algae in the water, additionally replacing the plankton that died due to change in pH. We have similar technology for cleaning up oil spills and some chemicals, so why not dilute carbonic acid as well.

omegaworks• 7 years ago

Our best hope it to adapt to the new norm rather than fight a losing battle.

The next stage in climate denialism is climate nihilism: thinking that it's too late now to do anything to directly confront the problem so why bother. All it does is protect and entrench existing extractive interests. We can accomplish amazing things (landing on the moon, overthrowing the nazis and winning WW2) when we align our society and focus the right incentives.

Anything we do to adapt along the margins won't mitigate the next great mass of people opening the spigot on high carbon lifestyles. Political systems will buckle under the weight of human migration away from the vulnerable coasts[1] and once-fertile land now too chaotic to farm[2]. We need to fund and develop the next wave of low-carbon tech to make it good enough and cheap enough to satisfy people's needs now, not piddle around looking for ways to monetize the fall.

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z

2. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-28/crazy-mid...

lopmotr4• 7 years ago

What migration?

"up to 630 M people live on land below projected annual flood levels for 2100, and up to 340 M for mid-century, versus roughly 250 M at present"

250 million people already live in those annually flooded regions, so that's only another 400 million by the year 2100. You think political systems can't cope? China has 300 million migrant workers, most of whom re-migrate every year!! They're coping already. We just need a lot of trains.

tempestn2• 7 years ago

This project looks pretty compelling as a cost-effective way to both remove C02 from the atmosphere and de-acidify the ocean: https://projectvesta.org/

AstralStorm2• 7 years ago

There's not enough olivine to even make a dent in CO2 levels. So this, while useful addition to arsenal against global warming, is nowhere near enough.

comicjk2• 7 years ago

You aren't taking into account the energy cost of separating substances from each other (understandable, since this isn't widely taught outside of chemical engineering). You can't get electricity by separating dilute carbonic acid from water, or CO2 from air. It's like trying to take the salt out of soup after you've oversalted it. Much better to stop before adding too much.

lopmotr4• 7 years ago

This kind of fantasy reminds me of people wanting giant escape slides and parachutes for the occupants of skyscrapers right after 9/11. Just because a journalist writes a shock-inducing story doesn't mean we need some extreme inventions to do anything about it. Like 9/11, it's not actually a big problem.

pjc502• 7 years ago

Too much carbon being released? Free carbon!

"Unlimited free mildly poisonous garbage" isn't really a great deal.

The best approach to making use of it appears to be from US Naval Research: electrically driven extraction of CO2+H2 which can then be combined into fuel. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312163311_Developme...

But that requires inputting more energy than you got from burning the fuel in the first place. So after California is fully converted to electric cars and the vast desert solar PV fields have a big surplus in the day, you could use that process to extract fuel from the ocean at prices somewhat higher than drilling it out of the ground.

ainiriand2• 7 years ago

California oceans? Does it have more than one?

warent• 7 years ago

I think it's pretty common to refer to a single body of water in plural form. Probably because it's so massive or maybe just due to the nature of liquid. For example: sailing the waters; a ship got caught in the stormy seas; etc.

theli0nheart• 7 years ago

Not in this case. You can pull that trick when the object is general, and it applies to more than just bodies of water. In this case, we’re talking about the Pacific Ocean, which is California’s ocean (of which there is only one ;) ).

spurgu2• 7 years ago

Bodies of water like lakes yes. Stormy seas would refer to the state of the sea (i.e. wavy, amount of unrest). An ocean is always an ocean and California is only connected to one of those. Coastal waters is clearly the correct term as they didn't do measurements across the whole Pacific (didn't read the source articles linked though), only around the coastline of California.

So either "California coast" or rather "California coastal waters", since the article is talking about the watery part of the coast, not the "landy" part.

zyang• 7 years ago

You have to be more pacific.

spurgu2• 7 years ago

Yeah the original title mentions "coastal waters" which is clearly the correct term, not sure why you're getting downvoted.

WiseWeasel• 7 years ago

Don’t forget the Salton Sea. Never forget.

ainiriand2• 7 years ago

I have just googled that and it blew my mind! A fascinating story.

mrfusion• 7 years ago

What’s the counter point to this?

JohnJamesRambo• 7 years ago

How can there be a counterpoint to a scientific measurement? It either is or isn’t more acidic.

comicjk2• 7 years ago

There could be sampling issues, since you can't measure the whole ocean at once. The CO2 in the atmosphere is linked to the carbonic acid in the ocean, though, and both indicators point in the same direction.

sevencolors• 7 years ago

Conspiracy fantasies

RickJWagner• 7 years ago

It's worth noting that the oceans are actually alkaline, not acidic.

But it makes for less alarming headlines to say "Oceans becoming less alkaline", doesn't it?

I really, really wish things were presented dispassionately and accurately. Things like this smack of propaganda.

trophycase• 7 years ago

becoming less alkaline = acidifying

one just takes fewer words

mirimir• 7 years ago

Seriously, WTF is a study from a US agency doing behind a paywall? That ought to be illegal! So here.[0]

0) Osborne et al. (2019) Decadal variability in twentieth-century ocean acidification in the California Current Ecosystem. https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0499-z

bsaul• 7 years ago

Problem with climate related news is that it has such a bad record on wrong prediction that i’m having a hard time believing anything that’s written in regular newspaper. it’s just working too well at freaking people out, even the most scientific minds.

For example, I can’t remember the first time i read about ‘ arctic ice completely disappearing in the next ten years‘, or the polar bear going extinct..

wolfd• 7 years ago

While some headlines may be overly aggressive, many (anecdotally) of the very serious consequences of climate change are predicted to happen on the order of 50/100 years from now.

There are a couple reasons this sucks: - some people seem to not care about that far in the future - people seem to be pretty bad at detecting change in their environment over longer time scales

A memorable example of the second one: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b...

lurquer• 7 years ago

The underlying study is dubious... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0499-z

They took 0.5 meters of sediment.

They examined shells in the sediment, and using a very convoluted and new measurement technique, they found that 'larger' shells were at the bottom (without very much statistical certainty.) And, the study admits that other factors -- such as water temperature -- could effect the size/shell thickness... to what degree is ignored.

They then radiodated this 0.5 meter column of sludge, and after making assumptions about this and that and nuclear bomb testing and a host of other assumptions, they determined that the bottom of the 0.5 meter column was from 100 years ago, and the top more recent. (And, of course, they assume the sedimentation was perfectly uniform during the century because... reasons.)

And, then you have a graph, showing a decrease in some factor of shells (using a new measuring system) over a span of 100 years (give or take 100 years)...

they then claim the decrease is due to CO2, and Voila, the paper is sucked up by Nature.

I'm not criticizing the work. I'm sure the researchers would be the first to admit their conclusion is based on a host of assumptions and guesswork.

But, what I do find amusing is that a speculative study involving 0.5 meters of mud can get HN readers to begin proposing massive 'de-acidification' plants and fretting about the end of the world.

egberts1• 7 years ago

California oceans? Hard pass.

California oceans rising in acidity at alarming rate, study finds

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