CO2 + SaltWater = Acidic SaltWater and Dead Coral Reefs
CO2 + SaltWater = Acidic Sea
Corey Binns
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com
Scientists recently reported increasing acidity in the Pacific Ocean.
Largely due to the Ocean's absorption of carbon dioxide (CO2) released by the burning of fossil fuels on Earth.
The findings are consistent with previous studies done in other oceans.
The seas absorb about a third of the carbon dioxide humans put into the atmosphere, each year.
The oceans will absorb about 90 percent of carbon dioxide produced by humans during the next millennium, becoming far more acidic.
As carbon dioxide levels in oceans climb, marine life dies a slow death.
Free-swimming planktonic mollusks, grow at an impaired pace in waters laden with carbon dioxide. These mollusks serve as an important food source for North Pacific salmon, mackerel, herring and cod.
Similar detrimental effects in microscopic algae and animals could impact marine food webs and significantly change the biodiversity and productivity of the ocean.
"As humans continue along the path of unintended carbon dioxide sequestration in the surface oceans, the impacts of marine ecosystems will be direct and profound," Fabry said.
Visit LiveScience.com for scientific inquiry with an original point of view.
The "doubts" have sent researchers into forests and rangelands, out to the tundra and to sea, to track down and understand the missing carbon. This is not just a matter of intellectual curiosity.
Scorching summers, fiercer storms, altered rainfall patterns, and shifting species—the disappearance of sugar maples from New England, for example—are some of the milder changes that global warming might bring. And humanity is on course to add another 200 to 600 parts per million to atmospheric carbon dioxide by late in the century.
At that level, says Princeton University ecologist Steve Pacala, "all kinds of terrible things could happen, and the universe of terrible possibilities is so large that probably some of them will." Coral reefs could vanish; deserts could spread; currents that ferry heat from the tropics to northern regions could change course, perhaps chilling the British Isles and Scandinavia while the rest of the globe keeps warming.
Category 1: Nate, Ophelia, Philippe, Stan and Vince
Category 2: Irene
Category 3: Maria and Beta
Category 4: Dennis and Emily
Category 5: Katrina, Rita and Wilma
The World Health Organization estimated that global warming and precipitation trends due to anthropogenic climate change over the past 30 years claimed 150,000 lives each year. WHO predicts this number will double over the next 30 years if the trend continues.
"Of course, Greenpeace agrees fully with the fact that climate change is a real, serious problem and we have fought for years to tackle this, but we are not in favour of replacing the one serious environmental problem with the other and that is nuclear waste."
"Nuclear energy has this huge disadvantage which will be a major environmental problem for many generations after us, so we don't think this is the solution to climate change and there are much better solutions."
"It stays radioactive and really dangerous for more than 100,000 years, which is a timescale that we humans cannot (fully) understand."
What they found were countless barrels full of radioactive uranium powder, known as "yellowcake." They emptied the barrels to use them as water cisterns at home - and then had a taste.
"I thought it was milk powder," Mr. Kadhim recalls in his village on the edge of Tuwaitha, 15 miles southeast of Baghdad. "But when we poured it out, it made us dizzy. It tasted very bitter."
Greenpeace says it has found several radioactive sources in houses, including one irradiating at 10,000 times normal levels.
The team has found pieces of metal in houses that they say "look like nothing," but are emitting radiation locally at potentially dangerous levels.
The scientific community, tired of being refuted by "corporate scientists", came up with the definitive report that cannot be dispelled.
Since the '60s, the scientific community has been hammering away about the harm being done to the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels. They knew that the planet would warm gradually, and that it was necessary to start slowing down the use of CO-2 producing energy. They didn't have any concrete evidence of what was in the future but they knew it would cause change. Well, that was enough to get some legislation passed that helped a little. In fact, it helped allot in Los Angeles where smog had become a huge problem, but major changes in US and world use of carbon based fuels were difficult to make happen.
For decades, oil companies and the Energy Industry hired scientists to refute the claims of global warming. These "company scientists" gave bogus reports and tried to disprove every attempt by the real scientific community to bring a stronger awareness to the subject and get major legislation passed.
In '96 an oceanographer named Wally Broeker discovered the connection between ocean circulation and abrupt climate change. This was absolutely mind boggling news - that the result of global warming would be an abrupt (rather than the 10,000 year transition as had long been accepted) flip into "ice age type" weather patterns. This new information was slowly being accepted in the scientific community, and in '98 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery. This fact, that there is abrupt climate change coming, jolted the neo-cons into running the, then, Gov. George W. Bush in the Presidential Primary, and they did so using any means necessary to guarantee a win (push polling Senator McCain, keeping democrats off of Florida's voting rolls, etc.). When Bush became President he immediately turned 180 degrees on his campaign pledges and started on his disastrous environmental melt down.
So, in 2001, the scientific community decided to do something that could not be refuted by anyone. They put together a world wide commission of almost 3,000 experts - The International Arctic Science Committee - who came up with several possible scenarios from computer models of very dramatic changes, to more modest climate changes, and averaged the entire array to one that they all agree is very likely - The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment.
Based on tons of data, these scientists have finally finished the report and are releasing it to the public, the Congress, and the world. The data that they gathered shows an alarming rate of warming in the Arctic, where the ice cap is diminishing at increasing rates due to man's burning of fossil fuels, and there is no question about that. What will happen in the decades ahead is still, of course, unknown.....but there is consensus that climate change has already begun, and that it will continue, and that the rate of change will increase.
At some point, the ice caps will melt to a level which will shut down the Atlantic Conveyor that distributes heat from the equatorial region to the poles. At some point in the future, the growing season in Kansas will likely be reduced to 5 to 10 weeks a year. This knowledge, rather conspicuously, coincides with the right wing's blatant dismantling of the Bill of Rights and the Democracy of the United States.
They too, now know what the result of their gluttony for profits and their decades long neglect of the environment will bring, and they are calling in all bets. They didn't know about the Atlantic Conveyor (and it's sister in the Pacific) and that global warming would eventually cause an abrupt climate change. That is, quite frankly, very hard to understand without proof. But the proof has been shown in study after study, and is irrefutable - and the right wing knows it.
President Bush was selected to lead our nation in this time of "climate change awareness" very likely because of his coziness with the oil industry, and the energy industry is still unwilling to make major changes of their emissions or to curtail fossil fuel usage.
The current Administration has a despicable record on the environment - the worst ever. They have rolled back laws, and placed industry executives in oversight positions of the very industries they came from. Things have changed. We can now expect environmental concerns to be neglected even more than before, with the (supposed) mandate Bush received in the November election.
You may not need to worry yourself about this if you can tuck your family away in a mansion in the Caribbean or the Cayman Islands, like all of President Bush's friends will be able to do when food supplies start dwindling. If not.....perhaps you should worry.
Comm: "In the late 1990's scientist Wally Broker came up with an explanation for the sudden climate changes that had been found in the Greenland ice cores. The 25 years he had spent studying the ocean made him realise it had the potential power required to switch the climate so quickly. He knew the oceans have a huge influence on the earth's climate. The Atlantic for instance soaks up heat in the tropics creating a warm current that heads north and crosses the Atlantic. This is why Northern Europe is so much warmer than Labrador, even though it's on the same latitude. Wallys inspired new thought was that this warm current might be connected to a deep water current like an underwater conveyor belt. He called this system the Atlantic Conveyor."
Wally Broeker: "The Atlantic Conveyor transports an enormous amount of water. It's equal to all the rainfall in the world. If you had two pipes one transporting conveyor water and one transporting gutter pipe taking all the rain in the world they would have about equal amounts of water coming out. It means that the Conveyor is equal to something like seventy to eighty Amazon Rivers."
Comm: "Wally worked out that this mighty flow of water contributed about 30% of the entire heat received by Europe. It's equivalent to the heat from a million power stations. So if the conveyors circuit was to go wrong the temperature in Northern Europe would suddenly plunge."
Wally Broeker: "This is an important point in my career because I had spent 30 years up until that time studying, on one hand ocean circulation and on the other hand paleo climate and the two didn't really overlap very much and all of a sudden they came together because I realised that these two states could be the conveyor mode of circulation in the ocean on and the conveyor mode of circulation in the ocean off. And that hit me like a flash."
Comm: "But what would switch the conveyor on and off. This demonstration shows how the conveyor works. When the warm salty water from the tropics, here coloured dark blue, is cooled by the arctic winds in the north it gets denser and sinks. This sinking process is called convection. It's the mechanism that drives the conveyor. But if fresh water here coloured light blue floods the surface of the sea then it dilutes the salt water so it's no longer dense enough to sink, convection fails and the conveyor switches off. The search was then on to find out what source of fresh water could have regularly switched the conveyor on and off.
The culprit was melting ice. A warming atmosphere causes an armada of ice bergs to break away from the poles and melt diluting the salt water and forcing the conveyor to shut down. Only when the fresh water has sufficiently diluted over thousands of years can the ocean achieve the salinity required to restart the conveyor and warm the northern regions."
Richard Alley: "We are fortunate that a beautiful hypothesis was out there and that is Wally Broker's global conveyor shut-down. And it's very clear, to me, that what a global conveyor shut-down predicts is what we see in the ice core."
Comm: "The scenario of a big freeze in Northern Europe returns, but this time backed with strong scientific evidence and political acceptance. At a meeting of the world's ministers in Kyoto, Japan in 1997 there seemed finally to be a real understanding the something had to be done."
Ben Santer: "If the science is credible then people will do something about it if it is not credible then people will not do something about it. It was encouraging to me that what happened at Kyoto, I think, was a recognition - yes the science is credible."
Comm: "Next week we examine how governments are responding to the threat of climate change, and what impact the big climate conferences such as Kyoto and the Rio Earth summit have had in controlling greenhouse gas emissions.
What is increasingly certain is that global warming, fuelled by man is changing the climate. Whether it will get hotter or colder, wetter or dryer depends on the region of the world and the time of year. But all will share far greater extremes of weather than have been seen for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years."
Michael Meacher: "We are increasingly seeing that once in a century phenomena are now happening every year. And most people and the scientists certainly believe that this has a great deal to do with global warming. We have got to act for the future of mankind."
A small Green Sea Turtle was found along a
rock wall near the Dive In dive center in Key
Largo, completely covered with thick, black
oil. The baby turtle was rescued, using
mayonnaise (which dissolves the oil without
harming the turtle)
www.TurtleHospital.org
CO2 is now absorbed into the Oceans, causing acidification and potentially toppling food chain domino #1, the plankton.
Ocean "acidification" occurs when chemical compounds such as carbon dioxide, sulfur, or nitrogen mix with seawater, a process which lowers the pH and reduces the storage of carbon.
Ocean acidification hampers the ability of marine organisms—such as sea urchins, corals, and certain types of plankton—to harness calcium carbonate for making hard outer shells or "exoskeletons." These organisms provide essential food and habitat to other species, so their demise could affect entire ocean ecosystems.
Earth's rivers polluted with cancinogenic chemicals
Wed Oct 10, 2007 3:11pm EDT
www.reuters.com
PARIS (Reuters) - Rivers in eastern and northern France found to be contaminated with chemicals that have been outlawed since 1987 and are proving very hard to eliminate, the government reported on Wednesday.
The River "Rhone" which runs through the southeastern corner of France (scientists said) contained dangerous levels of polychlorinated biphenyls ( PCB / PCBs ).
The latest report said additional rivers were in an even worse condition because of industrial dumping dating back decades, including the River Seine which runs through Paris.
"It's a huge clean-up job," Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the secretary of state for ecology, told a news conference. Other big rivers in Europe are affected by the same problem, she said.
PCB's were used primarily as a cooling and insulating fluid for electricity transformers and capacitors. It has been banned in France since 1987 after research showed it could cause fertility, growth and cancer in humans.
Kosciusko-Morizet said PCB had been very heavily used in industry since the 1930s and France was suffering the consequences of long-standing pollution.
"Cleaning it up is far from easy. It's very complicated because there are huge amounts of sediment." She said it would be technically and economically impossible to clean up the whole Rhone River... (... what about the Ocean?)
Here is the PCB problem
.... connecting the dots .....
with plastic pollution....
=============-------..-------===============
( text_insert )
"Alguita, the oceanic research vessel from Algalita, just came back from one of its research expeditions in the Pacific Gyre, an area of the Pacific Ocean otherwise known as the Garbage Patch. They collected samples on the surface of the ocean and found evidence of record high concentrations of small plastic particles.
Birds and fish eat the plastic because it mimics the food they eat, zooplankton. Research data from the Algalita Foundation shows plastic particles outnumber zooplankton 6 to 1. Especially concerning is the fact that the plastic pieces can attract and hold hydrophobic elements like PCB and DDT at up to one million times background levels. As a result, this floating plastic is a "poison pill".
... so... the "easy" solution would simply be to get industry to stop
dumping millions of tons of toxins into the rivers/oceans....
( ... going back 50 years or so... )
... then just get the entire world to stop using plastic 'once',
and tossing it into the garbage/oceans....
... that will probably be about as easy as
oh... maybe stopping the use of fossil fuels...
then we can get back to work on that little global warming "issue".... :-)
Print
eMail
