The world's oceans are becoming more acidic, which poses a threat to sea life and Earth's fragile food chain, a climate expert said Thursday.
Oceans have already absorbed a third of the world's emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming, leading to acidification that prevents vital sea life from forming properly."The oceans are rapidly changing," said professor Stefan Rahmstorf on the sidelines of a U.N. conference on climate change that has drawn delegates from more than 100 countries to Kenya. "Ocean acidification is a major threat to marine organisms."
Fish stocks and the world's coral reefs could also be hit while acidification risks "fundamentally altering" the food chain, he said.
In a study titled "The Future Oceans — Warming Up, Rising High, Turning Sour," Rahmstorf and eight other scientists warned that the world is witnessing, on a global scale, problems similar to the acid rain phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s.
hm. A Green Peace lab was involved with this so I have an autoskepticism bit set. I'd like to see some independent verfication. I am willing to accept this, but I have issues with that org is all. It might be doing interesting things (if true) to the carbon isotope ratios that future paleontologists and geochemists would look at for information about the 6th Mass Extinction.
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A little bit of chemistry here for you. When you bubble CO2 through water, you get carbonic acid. You also get carbonated beverages (Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper). Carbonated beverages *are* acidic. I think that the slide that my coworker had as part of a pH presentation said that the pH of soda is 2.5 which is pretty acidic when you consider that 7 is neutral and that pH is logarithmic.
I don't know about just how acidic the ocean waters are becoming, as the ocean water is not "pure", so there's likely to be some buffering capacity available.
I do know however that as long as the saturation point of the ocean water has not been reached with regards to CO2 dissolution, and if the CO2 concentration in the air is greater than the CO2 concentration in the ocean, the ocean will continue to absorb CO2.
Likewise, should the concentration of CO2 in the water become greater than the concentration of CO2 in the air, the CO2 will off gas from the water into the air.
You can test this by opening a bottle of soda and then recapping it tightly. If you hear the "pssst" sound when you loosen the cap again, that's because the CO2 in the soda off gassed until an equilibrium was established within the bottle.
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