Deadly Ocean Acidification -- Hard To Deny, Harder To Geo-Engineer, But Not Hard To Stop -- Is Subject Of Documentary

Global warming is “capable of wrecking the marine ecosystem and depriving future generations of the harvest of the seas” (see Ocean dead zones to expand, “remain for thousands of years”).

A post on ocean acidification from the new Conservation Law Foundation blog has brought to my attention that the first documentary on the subject, A Sea Change: Imagine a World without Fish, is coming out.

Ocean acidification must be a core climate message, since it is hard to deny and impervious to the delusion that geoengineering is the silver bullet. Indeed, a major 2009 study GRL study, “Sensitivity of ocean acidification to geoengineered climate stabilization” (subs. req’d), concluded:

The results of this paper support the view that climate engineering will not resolve the problem of ocean acidification, and that therefore deep and rapid cuts in CO₂ emissions are likely to be the most effective strategy to avoid environmental damage from future ocean acidification.

If you want to understand ocean acidification better, see this BBC story, which explains:

Man-made pollution is raising ocean acidity at least 10 times faster than previously thought, a study says.

Or see this Science magazine study, “Evidence for Upwelling of Corrosive “Acidified” Water onto the Continental Shelf” (subs. req’), which found

Our results show for the first time that a large section of the North American continental shelf is impacted by ocean acidification. Other continental shelf regions may also be impacted where anthropogenic CO2-enriched water is being upwelled onto the shelf.

Or listen to the Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, which warns:

The world’s oceans are becoming more acid, with potentially devastating consequences for corals and the marine organisms that build reefs and provide much of the Earth’s breathable oxygen.

The acidity is caused by the gradual buildup of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, dissolving into the oceans. Scientists fear it could be lethal for animals with chalky skeletons which make up more than a third of the planet’s marine life….

Corals and plankton with chalky skeletons are at the base of the marine food web. They rely on sea water saturated with calcium carbonate to form their skeletons. However, as acidity intensifies, the saturation declines, making it harder for the animals to form their skeletal structures (calcify).

“Analysis of coral cores shows a steady drop in calcification over the last 20 years,” says Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of CoECRS and the University of Queensland. “There’s not much debate about how it happens: put more CO2 into the air above and it dissolves into the oceans.

“When CO2 levels in the atmosphere reach about 500 parts per million, you put calcification out of business in the oceans.” (Atmospheric CO2 levels are presently 385 ppm, up from 305 in 1960.)

I’d like to see an analysis of what happens when you get to 850 to 1000+ ppm because that is where we’re headed (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” — 1000 ppm).

The CLF post notes:

Dr. Jane Lubchenco, Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warns that an acidic ocean is the “equally evil twin” of climate change. Scott Doney, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution noted in a public presentation that “New England is the most vulnerable region in the country to ocean acidification.”

In June, dozens of Academies of Science, including ours and China’s, issued a joint statement on ocean acidification, warned “Marine food supplies are likely to be reduced with significant implications for food production and security in regions dependent on fish protein, and human health and wellbeing” and “Ocean acidification is irreversible on timescales of at least tens of thousands of years.” They conclude:

Ocean acidification is a direct consequence of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. To avoid substantial damage to ocean ecosystems, deep and rapid reductions of global CO2 emissions by at least 50% by 2050, and much more thereafter are needed.

We, the academies of science working through the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues (IAP), call on world leaders to:

• Acknowledge that ocean acidification is a direct and real consequence of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations, is already having an effect at current concentrations, and is likely to cause grave harm to important marine ecosystems as CO2 concentrations reach 450 ppm and above;

• Recognise that reducing the build up of CO2 in the atmosphere is the only practicable solution to mitigating ocean acidification;

• Within the context of the UNFCCC negotiations in the run up to Copenhagen 2009, recognise the direct threats posed by increasing atmospheric CO2 emissions to the oceans and therefore society, and take action to mitigate this threat;

• Implement action to reduce global CO2 emissions by at least 50% of 1990 levels by 2050 and continue to reduce them thereafter.

If we want to save life in the oceans — and save ourselves, since we depend on that life — the time to start slashing carbon dioxide emissions is now.

Read how oceans are the new atmosphere in the Worldchanging archives.

This piece originally appeared in Climate Progress.

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Deadly Ocean Acidification -- Hard To Deny, Harder To Geo-Engineer, But Not Hard To Stop -- Is Subject Of Documentary

Global warming is “capable of wrecking the marine ecosystem and depriving future generations of the harvest of the seas” (see Ocean dead zones to expand, “remain for thousands of years”).

A post on ocean acidification from the new Conservation Law Foundation blog has brought to my attention that the first documentary on the subject, A Sea Change: Imagine a World without Fish, is coming out.

Ocean acidification must be a core climate message, since it is hard to deny and impervious to the delusion that geoengineering is the silver bullet. Indeed, a major 2009 study GRL study, “Sensitivity of ocean acidification to geoengineered climate stabilization” (subs. req’d), concluded:

The results of this paper support the view that climate engineering will not resolve the problem of ocean acidification, and that therefore deep and rapid cuts in CO₂ emissions are likely to be the most effective strategy to avoid environmental damage from future ocean acidification.

If you want to understand ocean acidification better, see this BBC story, which explains:

Man-made pollution is raising ocean acidity at least 10 times faster than previously thought, a study says.

Or see this Science magazine study, “Evidence for Upwelling of Corrosive “Acidified” Water onto the Continental Shelf” (subs. req’), which found

Our results show for the first time that a large section of the North American continental shelf is impacted by ocean acidification. Other continental shelf regions may also be impacted where anthropogenic CO2-enriched water is being upwelled onto the shelf.

Or listen to the Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, which warns:

The world’s oceans are becoming more acid, with potentially devastating consequences for corals and the marine organisms that build reefs and provide much of the Earth’s breathable oxygen.

The acidity is caused by the gradual buildup of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, dissolving into the oceans. Scientists fear it could be lethal for animals with chalky skeletons which make up more than a third of the planet’s marine life….

Corals and plankton with chalky skeletons are at the base of the marine food web. They rely on sea water saturated with calcium carbonate to form their skeletons. However, as acidity intensifies, the saturation declines, making it harder for the animals to form their skeletal structures (calcify).

“Analysis of coral cores shows a steady drop in calcification over the last 20 years,” says Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of CoECRS and the University of Queensland. “There’s not much debate about how it happens: put more CO2 into the air above and it dissolves into the oceans.

“When CO2 levels in the atmosphere reach about 500 parts per million, you put calcification out of business in the oceans.” (Atmospheric CO2 levels are presently 385 ppm, up from 305 in 1960.)

I’d like to see an analysis of what happens when you get to 850 to 1000+ ppm because that is where we’re headed (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” — 1000 ppm).

The CLF post notes:

Dr. Jane Lubchenco, Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warns that an acidic ocean is the “equally evil twin” of climate change. Scott Doney, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution noted in a public presentation that “New England is the most vulnerable region in the country to ocean acidification.”

In June, dozens of Academies of Science, including ours and China’s, issued a joint statement on ocean acidification, warned “Marine food supplies are likely to be reduced with significant implications for food production and security in regions dependent on fish protein, and human health and wellbeing” and “Ocean acidification is irreversible on timescales of at least tens of thousands of years.” They conclude:

Ocean acidification is a direct consequence of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. To avoid substantial damage to ocean ecosystems, deep and rapid reductions of global CO2 emissions by at least 50% by 2050, and much more thereafter are needed.

We, the academies of science working through the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues (IAP), call on world leaders to:

• Acknowledge that ocean acidification is a direct and real consequence of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations, is already having an effect at current concentrations, and is likely to cause grave harm to important marine ecosystems as CO2 concentrations reach 450 ppm and above;

• Recognise that reducing the build up of CO2 in the atmosphere is the only practicable solution to mitigating ocean acidification;

• Within the context of the UNFCCC negotiations in the run up to Copenhagen 2009, recognise the direct threats posed by increasing atmospheric CO2 emissions to the oceans and therefore society, and take action to mitigate this threat;

• Implement action to reduce global CO2 emissions by at least 50% of 1990 levels by 2050 and continue to reduce them thereafter.

If we want to save life in the oceans — and save ourselves, since we depend on that life — the time to start slashing carbon dioxide emissions is now.

Read how oceans are the new atmosphere in the Worldchanging archives.

This piece originally appeared in Climate Progress.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Joe Romm in Planet at 9:46 AM) ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/worldchanging_fulltext/~3/YN8hlXXn1Rw/010450.html/feed/ 0 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/worldchanging_fulltext/~3/U3gI-unM-pk/010401.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/worldchanging_fulltext/~3/U3gI-unM-pk/010401.html#comments Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:27:09 +0000 Geoff Manaugh 10401@http://www.worldchanging.com/

[Image: "Lightning Bugs in York, PA," by tom.arthur, courtesy of a Creative Commons license].

While staying in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney for a few days last week, I managed to re-read W.G. Sebald's book The Rings of Saturn.

At one point, Sebald describes two entrepreneurial scientists from the 19th century, who he names Herrington and Lightbown; together, we're told, they had wanted to capture the bioluminescent properties of dead herrings and use that as a means of artificially illuminating the nighttime streets of Victorian London.

Sebald writes:

An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring is that, when dead, it begins to glow; this property, which resembles phosphorescence and is yet altogether different, peaks a few days after death and then ebbs away as the fish decays. For a long time no one could account for this glowing of the lifeless herring, and indeed I believe that it still remains unexplained. Around 1870, when projects for the total illumination of our cities were everywhere afoot, two English scientists with the apt names of Herrington and Lightbown investigated the unusual phenomenon in the hope that the luminous substance exuded by dead herrings would lead to a formula for an organic source of light that had the capacity to regenerate itself. The failure of this eccentric undertaking, as I read some time ago in a history of artificial light, constituted no more than a negligible setback in the relentless conquest of darkness.

Sebald goes on to write, elsewhere in the book, that, "From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away."

But it's the idea that we could use the bioluminescent properties of animals as a technique of urban illumination that absolutely fascinates me.

In fact, I'm instantly reminded of at least three things:

1) Last month I had the pleasure of stopping by the Architectural Association's year-end exhibition of student work. As part of a recent studio taught by Liam Young and Kate Davies – which, incredibly, included a field trip to the Galapagos Islands – a student named Octave Augustin Marie Perrault illustrated the idea of a "bioluminescent bacterial billboard."

From the project text: "A bioluminescent bacterial billboard glows across the harbour... We are constantly reminded of the condition of the surrounding environment as the bio indicators becomes an expressive occupiable ecology."

[Image: Bioluminescent billboards on one of the Galapagos Islands, by Octave Perrault].

In many ways, Perrault's billboards would be a bit like the River Glow project by The Living... only it would, in fact, be illuminated by the living. These bioluminescent bacteria would literally be a living window onto a site's environmental conditions (or, of course, they could simply be used to display ads).

Liam Young, the studio's instructor, has also designed a version of these bioluminescent displays, casting them more fantastically as little creatures that wander, squirrel-like, throughout the city. They pop up here and there, displaying information on organic screens of light.

[Image: Bioluminescent billboards by Liam Young].

I'm genuinely stunned, though, by the idea that you might someday walk into Times Square, or through Canary Wharf, and see stock prices ticking past on an LED screen... only to realize that it isn't an LED screen at all, it is a collection of specially domesticated bioluminescent bacteria. They are switching on and off, displaying financial information.

Or you're watching a film one night down at the cinema when you realize that there is no light coming through from the projector room behind you – because you are actually looking at bacteria, changing their colors, like living pixels, as they display the film for all to see.

Or: that's not an iPod screen you're watching, it's a petri dish hooked up to YouTube.
This is what I imagine the world of screen displays might look like if Jonathan Ive had first studied microbiology, or if he were someday to team up with eXistenZ-era David Cronenberg and produce a series of home electronic devices.

Our screens are living organisms, we'll someday say, and the images that we watch are their behavior.

2) As I mentioned in an earlier post, down in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales is a tunnel called the Newnes Glow Worm Tunnel. It is a disused railway tunnel, bored through mountain sandstone 102 years ago, that has since become the home for a colony of glow worms.

As that latter link explains: "If you want to see the glow worms, turn off your torch, keep quiet and wait a few minutes. The larvae will gradually 'turn on' their bioluminescence and be visible as tiny spots of light on the damp walls of the tunnel."

[Image: A map of the Glow Worm Tunnel Walk, New South Wales].

Incorporate this sort of thing into an architectural design, and it's like something out of the work of Jeff VanderMeer – whose 2006 interview here is still definitely worth a read.

I'm picturing elaborate ballrooms lit from above by chandeliers – in which there are no lightbulbs, only countless tens of thousands of glow worms trapped inside faceted glass bowls, lighting up the faces of people slow-dancing below.

Or perhaps this could have been submitted to Reburbia: suburban houses surviving off-grid, because all of their electrical illumination needs are met by specially bred glow worms. Light factories!

Or, unbeknownst to a small town in rural California, those nearby hills are actually full of caves populated only by glow worms... and when a midsummer earthquake results in a series of cave-ins and sinkholes, they are amazed to see one night that the earth outside is glowing: little windows pierced by seismic activity into caverns of light below.

3) Several years ago in Philadelphia, my wife and I went out for a long evening walk, and we sat down on a bench in Washington Square Park – and everything around us was lit by an almost unbelievable density of fireflies, little spots of moving illumination passing by each other and overlapping over concrete paths, as they weaved in and out of aerial formations between the trees.

But what if a city, particularly well-populated with fireflies (so much more poetically known by their American nickname of lightning bugs) simply got rid of its public streetlights altogether, being so thoroughly drenched in a shining golden haze of insects that it didn't need them anymore?

You don't cultivate honeybees, you build vast lightning bug farms.

How absolutely extraordinary it would be to light your city using genetically-modified species of bioluminescent nocturnal birds, for instance, trained to nest at certain visually strategic points – a murmuration of bioluminescent starlings flies by your bedroom window, and your whole house fills with light – or to breed glowing moths, or to fill the city with new crops lit from within with chemical light. An agricultural lightsource takes root inside the city.

Using bioluminescent homing pigeons, you trace out paths in the air, like GPS drawing via Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

An office lobby lit only by vast aquariums full of bioluminescent fish!

Bioluminescent organisms are the future of architectural ornament. Someone tell The ARC Show.

[Image: A bioluminescent tobacco plant, via Wikivisual].

On the other hand, I don't want to strain for moments of poetry here, when this might actually be a practical idea.

After all, how might architects, landscape architects, and industrial designers incorporate bioluminescence into their work?

Perhaps there really will be a way to using glowing vines on the sides of buildings as a non-electrical means of urban illumination.

Perhaps glowing tides of bioluminescent algae really could be cultivated in the Thames – and you could win the Turner Prize for doing so. Kids would sit on the edges of bridges all night, as serpentine forms of living light snake by in the waters below.
Perhaps there really will be glowing birds nesting in the canopies of Central Park, sound asleep above the heads of passing joggers.

Perhaps the computer screen you're reading this on really will someday be an organism, not much different from a rare tropical fish – a kind of living browser – that simply camouflages new images into existence.

Perhaps going off-grid will really mean turning on the lifeforms around us.

This piece originally appeared on BLDBBLOG.

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(Posted by Geoff Manaugh in Planet at 3:27 PM) ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/worldchanging_fulltext/~3/U3gI-unM-pk/010401.html/feed/ 0 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/worldchanging_fulltext/~3/oAcaNcs98n8/010286.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/worldchanging_fulltext/~3/oAcaNcs98n8/010286.html#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 01:28:06 +0000 WorldChanging Team http://www.greendesign.com/2009/08/11/biodiversity-hotspots-certain-places-are-richer-than-others/

Conservation International's Biodiversity Hotspots page is worth a visit. It offers a good overview of why certain places are biologically richer than others, and why protecting those places is an important part of any plan to retain as much of the richness of life as possible.

This collection is a part of Resources from the Worldchanging Library. Throughout this series, we will present the best resources from our archives. To view the complete list, please click here.

CCphoto credit