Citizen Power

This isn’t about piracy, although pirates seem to be a huge problem lately.   This is about ocean acidification, a much bigger problem than most people realize.   For one thing, the growing ocean acidification might end a lot of the life in the ocean, especially that associated with coral reefs and with shells, and that would lead to massive food shortages around the world.  Hundreds of millions of people depend on the ocean as a major food source.  Why is the ocean becoming more acidic, and what is the problem?

This information is from a recent radio interview with Dr. Richard A. Feely, an Oceanographer at the NOAA Pacific Marine Laboratory in Seattle, and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. His main area of focus is carbon cycles in the ocean, and this very problem.

At a 3-day summit in Copenhagen last month, European scientists warned that we’re creating ocean conditions not seen since dinosaurs walked on the earth, 65 million years ago.   Human beings have recreated these hostile conditions in about 200+ years by burning fossil fuels and with harmful agriculture practices,  and as a result, carbon emissions continue to rise and affect the oceans.

Ocean acidification isn’t complicated.  As we burn coal and oil and natural gas and gasoline for fuel and energy, all that CO2 is released into the atmosphere.  Over about the past 250 years, we have released about 540 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.  About a third of that has been absorbed by the oceans. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a gas that immediately reacts with sea water, and it forms a weak acid called carbonic acid .   This carbonic acid quickly dissociates and releases a hydrodyne, which gives the ocean its acidity. This increase in carbonic acid over time has increased the acidity in the last 200 years of about 30%.  With the projections of the use of fossil fuels in the future, we could see increases in acidity by 150% by the end of this century. This is what has scientists hugely concerned.

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