Antarctic Marine Wildlife Is Under Threat From Ocean Acidification, Study Finds 180
A study has found that a decreased pH level in the antarctic is damaging the shells of native wildlife. "Marine snails in seas around Antarctica are being affected by ocean acidification, scientists have found.
An international team of researchers found that the snails' shells are being corroded.
Experts says the findings are significant for predicting the future impact of ocean acidification on marine life.
The results of the study are published in the journal Nature Geoscience (abstract).
The marine snails, called "pteropods", are an important link in the oceanic food chain as well as a good indicator of ecosystem health. 'They are a major grazer of phytoplankton and... a key prey item of a number of higher predators - larger plankton, fish, seabirds, whales,' said Dr Geraint Tarling, Head of Ocean Ecosystems at the British Antarctic Survey and co-author of the report."
When you get lemons... (Score:4, Funny)
The lower the pH gets, the better chlorine will work. Being closer than ever to pool-quality water in the ocean, the Antarctic people should spin this and enjoy a boom in tourism! I bet they can't wait to see more people that those bearded scientists who don't spend a dime on penguin art.
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You are confusing citizenship with where one lives.
The scientists in Antarctica certainly do live in Antarctica during their months/years of work. It's not like you can fly home after an 8 hour shift to your respective home country, sleep, and go back.
And you're wrong about the closest country, too. Chile is closer.
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BMO
Re:When you get lemons... (Score:5, Informative)
>While there are any number of support teams down there along with the formal researchers, both on the ice and in the water, there aren't any gift shops.
You would be wrong about this too.
http://www.ukaht.org/peninsula/port-lockroy [ukaht.org]
"The buildings were renovated in 1996 by a team from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and since then opened to visitors during the Antarctic summer. See more about the restoration. This is made possible only by the proceeds of the small gift shop which all go towards renovation of historic sites in Antarctica. "
http://www.yogoyo.com/antarctica-travel-guide/palmer-station-photos/gift-shop-palmer-station-antarctica.htm [yogoyo.com]
A photo of a Ukrainian gift shop in Antarctica:
http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/p/m/1f4d46/ [virtualtourist.com]
There are other links, but those were some of the top few.
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BMO
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I stand corrected once again, and humble myself before your art and craft
It's called Google.. try using it when you feel like smacking someone into the dust for being wrong.
Plus, you need to grow a sense of humour. The OP was clearly a joke.
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There ARE no "Antarctic people"; nobody lives there. The closest is New Zealand.
1. You need to get a sense of humor. The GPP was a joke.
2. You need to get a map. The closest country to Antarctica is Chile, not NZ.
chem 101 (Score:5, Informative)
CO2(aq) + H2O(l) H+(aq) + HCO3–(aq) [distilled water reaction]
2NaOH(aq) + CO2(g) Na2CO3(aq) + H2O(l) [sodium hydroxide reaction]
Explanatory:
Carbon dioxide reacts with water at standard temperature and pressure to form a weak acid and hydrogen ions (both in solution), adjusting pH *at saturation* from about 7.6-6.0. That it is known yet underreported that the world's oceans are the carbon sink to beat all others, puts lie to the CO2 problem and a simple classroom experiment with distilled water, a straw, sodium hydroxide solution and phenol indicator proves this.
Incidentally, for the carbon sink to fail would require the oceans to be heated to just below boiling. Not likely to happen yet for around 5 billion years.
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For clarity, the formulas should read something like:
CO2(aq) + H2O(l) H+(aq) + HCO3–(aq) [distilled water reaction]
2NaOH(aq) + CO2(g) -> Na2CO3(aq) + H2O(l) [sodium hydroxide reaction]
Re:chem 101 (Score:5, Informative)
slashdot please fix the unicode. This is getting annoying.
here is the experiment [nuffieldfoundation.org]
Re:chem 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't the issue is how much carbon the oceans can sink. (Your giant test tube). I think the issue is whether ocean life can survive it. Besides Chem 101, there is also Biology 101.
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Evolution doesn't happen on that timescale, fuckwit.
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So let me get this straigh. You're arguing we can do whatever the fuck we want and because it won't likely kill all humans, that's okay?
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That's like saying "my windshield will survive hitting that moose, because glass bends ever so slightly."
Cue hat trick, can haz car anaology.
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Actually it's more like arguing that they'll still have their windshield glass after it is re-formed by the moose, which many of them argue with a straight face.
Chem 102 (Score:4, Informative)
Too bad you apparently stopped at chem 101. In Chem 102 one might learn that reactions are not instantaneous.
Have you ever tried to dissolve atmospheric carbon dioxide in water? If so, you will note that the rate of dissolution is not very high.
As a result, though the ocean is fully capable of dissolving the CO2 produced by burning of fossil fuels, it will do so very slowly -- over a multiple-century timescale. (And it will disrupt marine ecosystems in doing so.) Incidentally, this process is already incorporated into all climate models.
To make the CO2 dissolve faster, you could use a stirring system to incorporate gas into the bulk liquid and to distribute the bicarbonate evenly. Good luck finding one big enough to stir the ocean.
Alternatively, you could use a strong base, like hydroxide, to deprotonate bicarbonate and drive the process to completion. Unfortunately, strong bases are not available as raw materials. Their production results in the release of large amounts of acidic chemicals like chlorine, which must be disposed of or else they will acidify the ocean and cancel out the effect of all the hydroxide.
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stirring system? What, you mean like the TIDES?
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No. Pick up a book once in a while. Or at least bother to look stuff up up on Wikipedia.
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Incidentally, for the carbon sink to fail would require the oceans to be heated to just below boiling. Not likely to happen yet for around 5 billion years.
Chemistry 101, please say hello to Mathematics 201. All these reactions rates depend on concentrations. So say hello to differential equations. The rates depend on concentrations. Oceans were always a sink and volcanoes the emitters. But if you 100x the emission rate, your steady state solution may not be what you think it is.
Finally, there is Biology 101. Shells have been used by ALL forms of aquatic life at the bottom of the food chain since shortly after the formation of multicellular life 500 million ye
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Finally, there is Biology 101. Shells have been used by ALL forms of aquatic life at the bottom of the food chain since shortly after the formation of multicellular life 500 million years ago. Changing such a basic ocean chemistry can have catastrophic changes for the entire biosphere. It is not when you kill off all the whales or tuna that we fuck ourselves over. It is when we manage to affect the micro cellular life, the phytoplankton, the bugs, that the real change begins
Oh quit being such a conservative panty waist. Nature by itself is too friggin boring - changes over millions of years? Where's the fun in that? We humans need instant gratification. We need to reboot the food change so things happen faster.
Otherwise, we won't be able to insert as many commercials. That would be a problem.
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He is a pseudo skeptic who has come up with a simplistic claim and he'll ride it all the way. I do love how deniers claim natural systems are too complex to model, until of course they need to bolster their own claim, and then suddenly Chem 101 is all one needs to model atmospheric-oceanic reactions.
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Chemistry 101, please say hello to Mathematics 201.
All this knowledge and we still burn through fossil fuels like a crack whore in a meth lab.
Climate change is an Anthropogenic addiction.
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It's only under-reported if you frequent just the denialist sites. It has been stated for decades by researchers what are the main sources and sinks of CO2 and how much.
Please don't forget that the oceans are not pure water; you'd have to be sure that the other substances won't have an impact one way or the other.
That's not a simple problem.
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"Not likely to happen yet for around 5 billion years."
See, it's just this sort of short term thinking that gets us into trouble.
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narcissistic? Really, you're projecting. You lose.
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Careful with the Narcissistic label, I'd think that Mann, Jones, Gore and Connolley have displayed more than a few narcissistic behaviours over the years.
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None of which forms an effective rebuttal since I didn't *diagnose* anyone but merely pointed out a fact and presented that fact as an indicator, and not a diagnosis.; so I am specifically not elevating myself to the level of expert.
OTOH , the fact is that the OP wishes his own (lack of ) expertise - which fact is made devastatingly clear when real experts roll in to rebut him MOST effectively- to be taken as rebutting the work of thousands of PhDs. who have spent first 4 years studying the subject mat
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[...]implies you suffer from narcissistic personality disorder
Yeah that word implies pretty much means what it means.
But apparently , you cant read my post, you can't read your OWN post quoting my post either. Thus we get this from you:
You may try to spin this with claims of citing "facts", or retcon'ing in your mind that you attempted to window-dress your diagnosis with a pseudo-disclaimer such as "it's likely" (which, despite your previous claim, you did no such thing).
Ouch. It has to hurt.
Meanwhile, back in reality the OP did in fact CONFIDENTLY ASSERT that his "little classroom experiment" disproved AGW. Yep , that's pretty mu
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Yeah what you're saying would be true if I had in any way advertised myself as or projected myself as an *authority* making a clinical *diagnosis*. But I didn't So you're talking to yourself about now and repeating it again and again doesn't bring it any closer to it being true. .
The basic premise you're pursuing- that the concepts of psychiatry are forbidden to non-professionals even in casual conversation, is just weird.
Not unlike yourself.
erosion of coral (Score:5, Interesting)
a friend of mine just started at portsmouth university, studying marine biology, and we happened to talk about this subject. the situation's actually much worse than being reported here, because the coral reefs are *also* being corroded. given that coral reefs are where the majority of the ocean's life-forms congregate, if that eco-system collapses we're in real serious trouble. i say trouble: the planet's likely to survive, and to re-generate life over the next hundred millenia or so. it's just that humans really won't be around to enjoy being here, that's all.
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In 100 years, by the time the more alarmist predictions suggest we'll be dealing with 5 degrees more global heat, we'll be busy terraforming Mars,
That's really optimistic.
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but instead 'make small, incremental changes, leading in the direction of the environment you want', the problem is much easier. Anywhere you can add extra heat, oxygen, or water to the system is a net win; the question is simply how to most effectively do this on a large scale.
Hmmm that is an interesting point. I would suggest again though, that it is not as easy as it sounds; for example, we've been burning coal here on earth at a massive scale for a hundred years, and it's barely made a detectable difference in earth's temperature. Do you think we'd be able to come anywhere near that output on Mars?
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On Mars you would not use CO2 as a greenhouse gas for terraforming but Methan and later Tetrafluoromethane (CF4) or other polymers which are about 10k as potent as CO2.
(Note: in the canions of Mars you already have a quite high air pressure and during summer at daytime the temperature is above 0 degrees most of the time)
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No, your (or my) parent was asking how terraforming on Mars would work in a "reasonable" timeframe.
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What's the plan for generating a magnetic field to keep the atmosphere from being blown off by solar wind?
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Because we're going to fuck this one up pretty bad, and petroleum executives and shareholders will need a new place to live.
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We're not even sure that enough of the plants we need will grow well enough on Mars. If they don't then there's no great benefit to all that land on Mars. Might as well be growing plants in space colonies.
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Free source of gravity, free radiation deflector (if it has a magnetosphere), and relatively easily obtained materials makes a planet the most promising prospect for efficient colonization.
We won't get to Mars in sufficient numbers to sustain a population if we don't take care of Terra. We are quite capable of ruining our own economy/ecology to the point where we will too busy fighting the elements to spare the resources, and seem to be on such a course at present, barring a commercially viable breakthroug
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1) Is 38% g enough for sustainable human life? We could build space stations with 1g by using tethers.
2) It doesn't have enough of a magnetosphere: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast31jan_1/ [nasa.gov]
3) The moon and the asteroids would be more convenient sources of materials than Mars.
We should build space stations with artificial gravity first. Then we can do 38% g and 1g for as long as we want and see how well humans do on those in the long term (you have two groups one at 0.38g and one a
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Yep, things change. 98% of all species are extinct. However, we're driving the car now. And heading into the cliff wall with it. No matter what happens, we probably won't be able to cause extinction of the human race, but we might get fairly close.
I'm kind of divided as to whether or not this is a good thing in the long run. The sad part about it is that we can effect a much more gradual change to the environment - one that will leave the planet more or less the same (and remember, WE like it the way i
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However, we're driving the car now. And heading into the cliff wall with it.
The problem isn't the car, it's the number of people - as population grows WE all suffer.
i.e less people, less power required, less agriculture, less environmental stresses. The opposite is basically true too.
Everyone who has, or has had multiple children are the root multiplier of the problems we are facing today. To blame any single technology as the problem is disingenuous.
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However, we're driving the car now. And heading into the cliff wall with it.
The problem isn't the car, it's the number of people - as population grows WE all suffer.
i.e less people, less power required, less agriculture, less environmental stresses. The opposite is basically true too.
Everyone who has, or has had multiple children are the root multiplier of the problems we are facing today. To blame any single technology as the problem is disingenuous.
No they're not. Population has become the proxy argument for people who want to make the problem seem "unsolvable" so they can justify doing nothing. The population in nearly all western countries - those with the highest GHG emissions per capita - is stable or even into negative growth (Japan). Even if you fixed the number of people in the world, you'd still be burning fossil fuels and releasing the emissions into the atmosphere. It's a cumulative process.
And then of course you have supply issues: let's sa
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LOL mod parent Funny or Insightful!
Re:Natural Selection (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, lets put the dots really close together for you. No, the oceans acidity doesn't change all the time. That last time it changed like this the planet changed from a snowball into a sauna bath and it followed perhaps the largest extinction indecent in the planet's history (read up on the snowball earth.) This is not a minor change. This isn't a "Okay so we lose the parrotfish.. who the 'F' cares about parrotfish?" This is a global change in ocean chemistry attacking one of the primary constituents of zooplankton.
I'm guessing you're not a biologist, so let me give you an example. If something came along and wiped out all the grass. You're immediate response would be big whoop, no more mowing. The problem is that all grains are grasses. So everything that eats grass or grain get's impacted immediately. No more bread, or rice, or oats or barely or corn or millet (you want to think about what proportion of the human diet is grain based, its the only thing keeping large parts of the third world alive.) So no more milk. No more beef. In fact Cows, Pigs, Chickens, Turkeys, Horses, Deer, basically every grass eating animal, mammals including rodents at the bottom of the food chain, birds, insects... all gone, see yah, then the predators that eat them... like you and me... gone, gone, gone. Can you see the implications now. No Grass BAD!!!
So, animals with shells all have a larval stages and are at the bottom of the oceans food chain. Anything that kills them is EQUALLY BAD for all the critters up the food chain (again that includes us human beings.) The sudden loss of zooplankton causes a subsequent super bloom in phytoplakton (also a potentially bad thing all by itself.) This is not some far off maybe someday event. Coral Reef are bleaching this very moment as I write (one of the largest and more diverse ecosystems on the planet responsible for more kinds of fish, crustaceans, cephalopods, you name it) is on the verge of catastrophic collapse. You can't geoengineer extinct. Gone is gone. You think the cost of cutting back on burning carbon is expensive, figure out how much it'll cost replace the services that nature provides for free with manmade alternatives. You can't unscramble an egg. You can't fix this once you're satisfied its broken, because you'll be in a moving train barreling down the tracks and the only thing you'll be able to do is gird yourself for the crash.
Its all tied together. Its all based on Carbon. There's too much where it doesn't belong and now its beginning to be a real problem. Soon it will be a problem for which human beings will be unable to address. Why would anybody with the vaguest hint of sanity let something get so bad. Sorry, its inconvenient. Expensive. Even hurtful to developing people, who always take the brunt of what fails in the world. Simply letting it get worse will ensure the impact on those same people will be nothing less than devastating. Playing Russian Roulette with the future of humanity is far more irresponsible than acting now to reduce carbon, improve efficiency, develop alternative energy sources, and come up with new technologies to better sequester the byproducts of our civilization. Wake up, the coffee is burning! Right Now.
I don't know what planet you live on, but the one I live on is tangled up in bureaucrats and a collapsing middle class. Think for a moment. We haven't been on the moon in nearly 45 years. You think we can put enough people on Mars to make a difference if we break our ecosystem? By when? The numbers are all in. The hottest years in history all this decade. The ocean is rising. The oceans chemistry it getting dangerously unbalanced. Please read about the rise of slim. Lakes dying and changing to Hydrogen Sulfide cycles below a 100 feet. The list is huge, but its all point at the inescapable certainty than man is toxic and poisoning his mater. I agree that a human diaspora to the stars is the answer, but destroying the ecosystem before you can leave is just stupid.
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Re:Natural Selection (Score:4, Informative)
And you're not getting it. This isn't a slow change. Natural changes occur over millions of years, This has precipitated in just a few human generations. It's looking more and more like an exponential change, because multiple feedbacks are beginning to tilt. Melting permafrost releasing huge amounts of methane and CO2, the continued slash and burn of the tropical forests around the world. All these sinks are breaking at the same time because we failed to address the problem and so now instead of a linear progress of the atmospheric carbon we planned for, we're beginning to see what may in fact be very nonlinear results. Unpredictable results which in a sentence mean results for which we will be unable to plan. The rate of change that "A Natural System" can happily accommodate is about 500 to 5,000 times slower than the rate we're inducing currently. You are perfectly correct that life will succeed and evolve its way out of any mess we make. But first virtually everything dies. Life will go on, it just won't be with anything resembling a human being in the neighborhood.
The only sudden changes we need to bring are the changes surrounding the use of our planet as a toilet for our industry. That should be sudden, and it should begin some time yesterday. Its becoming alarmingly clear that we've already missed the boat to get out of this without taking a beating. Now the outlooks grow increasingly dismal. However, it still doesn't have to be fatal. We are going to lose virtually all the iconic animals you're familiar with in this century. All the big animals of Africa (Elephants, Lions, Cheetahs, Giraffes, Hippo...) and Asia... gone. Virtually all of the higher primates, done. Whales, dolphins, fish, and crustaceans are currently a coin toss, but the prospects are pretty grim. Nothing has happened at this level in millions of years and we are busy cutting the floor out from beneath our own feet. There's an old saying. When you find yourself at the bottom of a deep hole, STOP DIGGING.
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There are three general types of solutions out there... unanimous solutions, which require everyone's cooperation, and fail if anyone defects; majority solutions, which require most people to cooperate, but fails unless most people coopera
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Not flawed at all, Gaia is and has always been fine with or without the presence of human beings. It just seems a shame to spawn a sentient race only to have it snuff itself out because it couldn't get its own basist primate instincts under control. We have so much to offer, if we just be responsible for our monkey urges. You know, stop slinging shit, stop trying to take it all, and stop freaking out at those different then ourselves. These are all hardwired behaviors, and most people simply operate below t
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The real issue is that none of the "solutions" advocated by the vast, vast, vast majority of the AGW crowd would remotely solve oceanic acidification. It would perhaps drop the saturation point in 100 years from what the high would be without said plans, but since saturation is so slow and we are already seeing effects that means virtually nothing. Which means the only solutions are either killing off the vast majority of humanity and hoping land based carbon sinks grow fast enough to offset the current aci
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The real issue is that none of the "solutions" advocated by the vast, vast, vast majority of the AGW crowd would remotely solve oceanic acidification. It would perhaps drop the saturation point in 100 years from what the high would be without said plans, but since saturation is so slow and we are already seeing effects that means virtually nothing. Which means the only solutions are either killing off the vast majority of humanity and hoping land based carbon sinks grow fast enough to offset the current acidification, or for humans to engineer a massive man-made carbon sequestration scheme.
Which "solutions" are you referring to. There's a lot of them. How do they fail to address ocean acidification?
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Not quite that grim (Score:2)
Actually the carbon dioxide does get removed from the system naturally as it gets absorbed by plants to become cellulose - we're just pumping gigatons of additional CO2 into the atmosphere faster than that can happen. If we somehow did manage to completely eliminate emissions (an admittedly... problematic goal), the CO2 concentration in both the atmoosphere and ocean would immediately begin falling again - presuming of course that we managed it before we throw the chemical balance so out of whack that the
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Not even for Homo sapiens? Okay, we aren't going extinct. But civilization as we know it might during the stress of dealing with climate change
Yes, lets not mention that fact that 'civilization as we know it' for the readers of slashdot is quite a bit different from the global median already. The fact is that civilization as WE know it is not perpetually sustainable regardless of the climate.
I for one hope we can sustain it for the rest of my life, and the way to do that is to continue exploiting cheap energy. As far as I am concerned, future generations are imaginary people, and in my imagination they too will exploit the cheapest form of ener
This is one of the realistic doomsday scenarios (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just one of the realistic doomsday scenarios that people need to take seriously- the collapse of food chain in the oceans.
Remember, it doesn't have to be that oceans are completely and totally dead for people to start acting as if they are. It's enough that they no longer provide food or jobs for a lot of people, especially in developing nations. When the oceans are seen to be moving inevitably and inexorably to that condition , then it's as good as real, just like a stock that people understand is going to zero is as good as worthless even when it's price is still positive.
If the really small things that support the fisheries- thing like phytoplankton which support the zooplankton which in turn support start to fail it takes with it the krill, mackerel, sardines, anchovies, tuna then upwards to the fish we eat -and we'll know if it starts to happen- then there will be price-panic food buying with the result that right then, tens of millions start to starve and economies start to collapse.
It doesn't have to be in full effect for the full societal reaction to get going, it just has to be *seen* as going into full effect. That's when the chaos, the insane inflation of food, the rioting, the wars and uncontrollable immigration and nation destabilizing kicks in. That's when the civil wars break out and the uber-terrorism- uniting the entire 3rd and 2nd worlds in a death-lust for the West kicks in.
Do you like your life? Do you like sitting down at your computer and surfing and learning and enjoying life? Would you like to continue in the same vein? Would you like things to generally keep going progressing slowly forward? Would you like your culture and civilization to continue? Are you *conservative* in that large sense of the word? Because right now the "conservatives" in America are the most reactionary, radical literally suicidal and culture-cidal group of cretins ever created.
Perhaps the real conservatives can step forward at this time. The guys who were in the Rod and Gun clubs, the sportsmen who were conservationists, like the WWII vets who started the ski resorts in the Rockies, maybe the people *like that* would like to step forward and reclaim their party and protect the earth from the coke snorter conservatives, the narcissist conservatives, the Aspberger conservatives for whom politics comes down to single issues like taxes or Obamacare or abortion. I'm talking about The Glenn Becks the Sara Palins the Grover Norquists the Ralph Reeds the fucking Christian Right and their one-Jesus-fixes-all-problems fucking form of goddamned mental retardation. I can't even think of one person that fits description of a real conservative in the whole motherfucking Republican Party. Oh, wait. John Huntsmen. OK. One. One motherfucker in the entire fucking party.
The deniers war against reality and taking immediate dramatic action while it still has the chance of being effective and economically viable isn't LIKE WWIII, it IS WWIII. It IS the reason that the next wave of tens of millions of people are going die and worse, it's a foreseable, preventable well-predicted event.
It's go time, Mr. President. It's waaaayyy past time to stop trying to diddle Congress's clit just right on this topic. It's time for the Executive to unilaterally declare global warming to be an urgent matter of national security and Executive Action to initiated unilaterally towards alternative fuels, towards conservation, towards binding treaties and against those voices in our society who have declared themselves to be terrorists determined to set off the global warming bomb and kill billions. There is nothing more to talk about , it's time for action- Executive Action. It's time to silence, disable, undermine, discredit, and dismantle those individuals and organizations who are sewing the seeds of doubt. Their careers need to be ended as ignominiously as possible and failing that their voices need to be silenced as discretely as possible. This is war. This is what war is. This is wha
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Even stocks don't work exactly at this way. The idea that a speculative attack on food will make any bit of difference is insane.
(I'm not saying that generalized exticntions at the oceans wouldn't be a bad thing. It would. It'd be very bad. But you need to review your model, that
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We're civilization- either you're with us, or you're against us.
My network of neural networks (machine intelligence) only had this to say when it scanned your post: false dichotomy
(un)Ironcially, that is actually the problem you should be fighting...
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> This is war. This is what war is. This is wha
Oh no! They got him!
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Yeah except that doing nothing about global warming will assuredly result in the end of civilization and the deaths of billions, which is apparently OK since "doing nothing" is the same as "doing no harm" in your twisted brain.
Reality is what it is. Doing nothing about global warming, denying global warming so society does nothing about it is nothing but a form of mass murder by dint of the results. Stopping that from happening is a form of law enforcement and the proper role of society.
You may think t
I got a thought (Score:2)
What if this is how the earth works? PH levels rise, and the ice caps start melting to balance crap out? What do we really know? The earth has been here for billions of years, and we have knowledge of it's weather and stuff for maybe 100 years?
That like taking 100 days of my life and basing my whole health history on how i was during that time.
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That like taking 100 days of my life and basing my whole health history on how i was during that time.
Hmm. I just see the paramedics now:
By the way, a lot of time and effort goes into trying to figure out what the climate did in the di
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Let's assume you're entirely right. I'd say the correct response would be to artificially alter the climate to maintain something like the status quo which is highly favorable to us and the animals that currently exist. What do you think about that?
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What do we really know? The earth has been here for billions of years, and we have knowledge of it's weather and stuff for maybe 100 years?
We have direct temperature readings for a hundred or so years, but we also have methods of determining temperature for geologic time scales, such as ice cores.
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The BBC has had bias issues as far as politics is concerned, but I haven't heard any bias from them against science. That is unless you consider ocean acidification an indicator of global warming which certain fringe (stupid) groups consider to be politics.
Re:Beware - overview may be severely biased... (Score:5, Funny)
The BBC has had bias issues as far as politics is concerned, but I haven't heard any bias from them against science. That is unless you consider ocean acidification an indicator of global warming which certain fringe (stupid) groups consider to be politics.
The big question to ask is cui bono? I think this is all a preconceived British plot to wipe out the French by depriving them of all their snails.
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A seaman has virgin boys? I thought they would be strictly captain's privilege.
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Re:Beware - overview may be severely biased... (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, this is the BBC, who took a corporate decision in 2006 to pursue an alarmist reporting stance.
They took a decision that there was no case to be made for having always to 'balance' the reporting of mainstream science with opposing views, most of which are not represented in the scientific literature anyway. In the same way that a natural history programme should not have to balance each mention of evolution with a creationist argument.
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A perfect example I like to use:
Objective reporting: "Experts say Earth is round, 'Flat-Earthers' entirely wrong"
Balanced reporting: "Debate rages on over potential roundness of Earth"
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They took a decision that there was no case to be made for having always to 'balance' the reporting of mainstream science with opposing views, most of which are not represented in the scientific literature anyway. In the same way that a natural history programme should not have to balance each mention of evolution with a creationist argument.
No they actually took the stance that they would no longer be impartial in these matters as per the advice of their secret panel of experts
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[A] Royal Charter that Requires Balance
Yes, and what they are required to balance is evidence, they are not required to provide a soap-box for corporate and/or political propaganda, that's Rupert's job, he does it well and dislikes competition. The BBC is supposed to be the antithesis to "tabloid journalism" and everything I see says that it is the closest thing the western world has to that ideal that is also a household name on a global scale. The BBC employees involved in the McAlpine case who failed to correctly weigh the evidence before bro
Re:Beware - overview may be severely biased... (Score:5, Informative)
1)Deep ocean antarctic water is corrosive to pteropod shells (for various reasons, including water pressure, composition of the water, etc).
2)Normally, from time to time there are upwells of the deeper water, which theoretically can cause pteropod shells to corrode.
3)These scientists developed a technique to observe corrosion in the shells, and observed that at around 200m, the shells are indeed corroded.
4)If ocean acidification increases, then it will cause more corrosion.
If ocean acidification increases, it could cause problems for wildlife. There's nothing particularly controversial here.
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Well... yes and no. It is true that a warm fluid - be it the ocean or Coca-Cola - cannot hold as much CO2 as the same fluid when cold. So when a cold fluid that is in equilibrium with the atmosphere warms, a portion of the dissolved gas is given off. But that's not the only thing that is going on. Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are also increasing, and on the whole that is what is forcing CO2 concentrations in the ocean. The ocean is far fr
Re:Beware - overview may be severely biased... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Beware - overview may be severely biased... (Score:5, Informative)
Remember, this is the BBC, who took a corporate decision in 2006 to pursue an alarmist reporting stance.
Technique one - ad homineum attack on the messenger. A study was done. That study was reported. Attempt to discredit the study by attacking the credibility of the entity doing the reporting. Instead considering the worth of the study itself, the hope is the integrity of the study will be smeared by smearing the entity that reported it.
Technique two- change the topic. We were talking about the effect of global warming on the oceanic food web , now we're going to start talking instead about the BBC and whether they're biased or not.
The original paper says that this is only a pilot study, and that it cannot definitely point to any disadvantage to the animals - 'they MAY suffer increased predation' is a typical comment
Technique three, misrepresent normal and appropriate scientific qualification of results as a license to dismiss the study's findings. The fact is, no single study is definitive. That's normal science. The certainty increases as each successive study is confirmed, amplified, and new studies support the same conclusions using different approaches. Each study considered individually comes with caveats; the picture of reality emerges from an aggregation of such studies. This is called "normal science" and it's how science gets to truth. This study fits into that framework.
Technique four- decontextualize the study from the larger supporting body of related evidence. Closely related to technique three above, the mass of evidence pointing to the devastating effects of oceanic acidification on the food web is incontrovertible. This study reinforces and elaborates this finding with new evidence. Seen in its proper context, this study's relevance increases because its findings are congruent with other studies showing the same disturbing trend- acidification of the oceans is assaulting the food web in the ocean.
The smallest part of the omitted scientific context:
http://www.ocean-acidification.net/FAQeco.html [ocean-acidification.net]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/10/ocean-acidification-epoca [guardian.co.uk]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/19/opinion/acid-test-for-oceans-and-marine-life.html?_r=0 [nytimes.com]
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/03/02/436193/science-ocean-acidifying-so-fast-it-threatens-humanity-ability-to-feed-itself/ [thinkprogress.org]
http://oceana.org/en/our-work/climate-energy/ocean-acidification/learn-act/effects-of-ocean-acidification-on-marine-species-ecosystems [oceana.org]
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/oct/06/local/la-me-acidic-oceans-20121007 [latimes.com]
http://www.examiner.com/article/lethal-carbon-dioxide-and-ocean-acidification-threaten-marine-life [examiner.com]
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You joke but that's a common line of thought among denialists. "How could we be so arrogant to think a little human activity could change the climate of this mighty planet?" or "God won't let that happen" or something like that. [skeptic.com]
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Less alkali is "more neutral" if you're starting off alkali.
Less alkali is "more acidic" if you're starting off acidic.
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i wonderif someone wants to do a study on the fossil record to see if a weakening in shell strength of ocean dwelling pteropods is highly corellated to known extinctions
My guess is no, because examining the corrosion in live specimens was difficult enough; they needed a scanning electron microscope. I would guess it near impossible to examine in fossils, if you could even find enough to test.
Re:why does this matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because whats going extinct is at the bottom of the food chain. It means everything above it goes extinct... and no, this hasn't happened in hundreds of millions of years. The impact is profound, and sudden (on biological scales) and devastating to all life on the planet. You and your children will be impacted. The ocean covers 3/4 of the planets surface and people in Kansas are impacted by the ocean directly. Someone is telling you that you have cancer, and your response is "Tell me when I hit stage four, then I'll worry." Interesting, but loony. Perhaps a little chemo and surgery now are indicated, Hmmmm.
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Of course, there's the fact that things like carbon trading schemes and everything else proposed by Al Gore et al has about as much to do with the environmental equivalent of chemotherapy as homeopathy has to do with medicine
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No, I know exactly what this article is talking about, what it means, and what it means in the context of several THOUSAND other fine works on the changing environment and its predicted impact to life on the planet. How many science articles do read a month, I'm in at around 500 (I'm a speed reader.) I'm conversant on topic as disparate as Cosmology, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Biology (biochemistry, ecology, genetics, genomics, proteomics, epigenetics, taxonomy, botany, medicine...) Chemistry (Organic and Ino
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This is what you said:
In fact, about 30-50% of marine invertebrate species (and most calcareous species) went extinct at K-Pg 65my ago, but only about 10% of bony fish went extinct and all mammalian lineages survived; so much for "everyth
Re:why does this matter? (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah those goofy scientists... what will they say next. New York being stomped flat by a super storm? The hottest years in history all being in the last decade? The upper atmosphere colder than any time on record. The oceans turning into a carbonated beverage! What do they know? Let's use up all the coal and oil and gas. What could possible go wrong?
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Your right, the article is about a a larval snail and the fact that is seriously imperiled by the fact its shell is dissolving away. You could say "Gone With The Wind" was a story about the spoiled daughter of a plantation owner. However, I'd guess it would be a fair argument that without the larger context of slavery and the Civil War the story would have no point or significance. The Snail is endangered because the ocean is too acid and carbonate shells are being dissolved. By the way. this article spotli
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Let's use up all the coal and oil and gas. What could possible go wrong?
Once we use it all up, fossil fuel emissions will be zero.
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Once we use it all up, fossil fuel emissions will be zero.
There will be a very brief period where all the forests and peat moss get turned into firewood.
Only then will fossil fuel emissions will be zero.
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True, and not only that, but it's carbon-neutral and renewable.
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Beware a group of elites telling you what to do!
Listen instead to your president. Trust what he says completely.
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You're right, let's hear what the Heartland Institute and Exxon have to say about this, we need balanced information here, not some scientific monologue.