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Earth Science

It's Time To Put Oceans To the Test in the Climate Fight, Scientists Say (theverge.com) 98

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
More than 200 scientists have signed onto a letter pushing for "responsible" research into ways to trap planet-heating carbon dioxide in the world's oceans. They want to take urgent action on the climate crisis, while making sure they don't trigger any new problems by relying on oceans to help in the fight. From a report: Polluters have trashed the world's atmosphere with carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. That blanket of pollution is already warming the planet and causing more extreme weather disasters. One way to keep climate change from getting worse is to take some of those historic emissions out of the atmosphere.

Oceans already do that for us, absorbing and holding around 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere. What if humans could supercharge that ability? That's what scientists want to better understand, along with any side effects that might come with messing with the chemistry of our oceans. Startups are already developing new technologies to sequester more CO2 in the sea. But there's still a lot we don't know about what impact that might have or what strategies might be most successful, the letter says.
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It's Time To Put Oceans To the Test in the Climate Fight, Scientists Say More

It's Time To Put Oceans To the Test in the Climate Fight, Scientists Say

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  • Side effects (Score:5, Informative)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @10:14AM (#63824862) Homepage

    " any side effects that might come with messing with the chemistry of our oceans"

    You mean the teeny weeny issue of when CO2 dissolves in water it forms carbonic acid? Which obviously affects the ph of the oceans and the more acidic the oceans become the harder it is for animals that make their shells out of calcium carbonate to form them.

    The main problem thayt have however is that CO2 doesn't dissolve as well in warmer water so there's a limit to how much the oceans can absorb anyway.

    Buy hey, as yet another clickbait What-if article it works great.

    • Re:Side effects (Score:5, Interesting)

      by WolphFang ( 1077109 ) <m.conrad.202@g m a i l .com> on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @10:20AM (#63824884)

      We already have issues with "bleaching" events I understand.

      What a lot of people don't seem to take into account is the feedback loop that we currently are experiencing. Personally, I'm convinced that we are going to experience much more extreme weather much sooner than most current modeled estimates indicate.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Budenny ( 888916 )

        What feedback loop?

        What extreme weather rises are current modeled estimates indicating?

        • > What feedback loop?

          I also wonder what exactly WolphFang is refering too with that.

          > What extreme weather rises are current modeled estimates indicating?

          It appears the models are underestimating the rise : "Models underestimate tails" https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

        • The IPCC Reports have extensive documentation on climate impacts, including extreme weather - see the Working Group II, Climate Impacts section. For the many positive and negative feedbacks in the climate, such as e.g. melted ice no longer reflecting sunlight thus warming faster, see the Working Group I section. Or just skim the Executive Summary, if you don't need all the detail.

      • Re:Side effects (Score:5, Interesting)

        by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @10:48AM (#63824974)
        You can’t even use average amounts to describe what is happening because of increased energy in the system. For example, where I am in the Midwest, we are about on par with average rainfall or a bit more but overall it’s been record heat and drought. Instead of rain every few days or a week or so we get it all in one giant storm after nothing for a month, with one dropping over a months worth in an hour. It caused localized flash flooding with cars floating in streets not normally hit because we didn’t used to get extreme run off events almost ever. The water never had time to sink in the soil because it was so dry it just ran off making the average amount a misleading number for reality. Even if we don’t see an average temperature or rainfall difference, if the extremes keep going they will absolutely destroy and alter the ecosystems.

        • You can’t even use average amounts to describe what is happening because of increased energy in the system. For example, where I am in the Midwest, we are about on par with average rainfall or a bit more but overall it’s been record heat and drought. Instead of rain every few days or a week or so we get it all in one giant storm after nothing for a month, with one dropping over a months worth in an hour. It caused localized flash flooding with cars floating in streets not normally hit because we didn’t used to get extreme run off events almost ever. The water never had time to sink in the soil because it was so dry it just ran off making the average amount a misleading number for reality. Even if we don’t see an average temperature or rainfall difference, if the extremes keep going they will absolutely destroy and alter the ecosystems.

          This - We're half drowning in the Northeast, but with heat. The Temps here are often warmer than in Florida in the summer.

          The winters for the past decade have been weird as well. Wet with rain. When I first moved into my house in the early 90's I'd go through about 3 tanks of gas in my snowblower a winter. It slowly went down, then around 2000, it dropped from 2 to 1 tank, and last year, I didn't even go through a half tank. So there is a real trend here.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by HBI ( 10338492 )

            Granted - the last decade or two has been pretty weird given what the years prior to 2000 were like.

            Even with that, I'm having a hard time with the geoengineering thing. Temperatures are obviously up, but we still don't know precisely why and what effect any further attempts at geoengineering will cause. There is a huge reduction in particulate matter, sulfur, etc. Anyone older than about 45 with any access to an urban center - meaning almost everyone - knows this without any argument required. Did that

            • The current thrust means we'll never have these answers. Just trying shit and seeing if it works, basically. Which is how we got here in the first place. I have a really hard time imagining that a test rig that took these factors into account couldn't be constructed.

              Yes, tests can be done, and have. The energy retention effects of CO2 has been the subject of kids and their science fair for many years now. The Sulfur aerosols experiment is a little more dangerous, but can also be done without a lot of trouble.

              The radiative forcing has real world confirmation, such as on Venus - too much CO2, and Mars - very little, but the calculations for both pan out with the predictions.

              And here on earth, we've dealt with acid rains and their effects - https://www.epa.gov/acidra [epa.gov]

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by HBI ( 10338492 )

                A test rig doesn't have to involve polluting the atmosphere. Scale it down.

                • A test rig doesn't have to involve polluting the atmosphere. Scale it down.

                  That's what I mean. You can do it in a box with a well designed experiment.

      • We already have issues with "bleaching" events I understand.

        As I understand it, bleaching is caused by changes in water temperature, not pH. We should be studying this, determining not only whether we can use the oceans as CO2 sinks to reduce warming impact on us, but also to see whether doing that increases, decreases or just shifts damage to the oceans themselves. It's possible that a bit of acidification is less damaging than allowing temperatures to rise, and it's equally possible that it's the opposite. Probably most likely is that both are a mixed bag of harms

    • I assume this would involve the deep ocean that is mostly cold, hypoxic and very little life. While there are probably unintended consequences, it's not my biggest concern. O2 is a big part of CO2 and oxygen levels in the atmosphere are decreasing. If it was found that we could lock up all of our excess CO2 in the ocean, we'll probably start generating even more of it and binding up our breathable oxygen.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

        O2 is a big part of CO2 and oxygen levels in the atmosphere are decreasing. If it was found that we could lock up all of our excess CO2 in the ocean, we'll probably start generating even more of it and binding up our breathable oxygen.

        No.

        CO2 has increased from 200 ppm to 420 ppm in the atmosphere. Even if we were to assume that the oceans were well mixed and in equilibrium with the atmosphere, that would only be equivalent to 21,000 ppm CO2 (if all held in the atmosphere). That's a substantial overestimat

    • " any side effects that might come with messing with the chemistry of our oceans"

      You mean the teeny weeny issue of when CO2 dissolves in water it forms carbonic acid? Which obviously affects the ph of the oceans and the more acidic the oceans become the harder it is for animals that make their shells out of calcium carbonate to form them.

      The main problem thayt have however is that CO2 doesn't dissolve as well in warmer water so there's a limit to how much the oceans can absorb anyway.

      Buy hey, as yet another clickbait What-if article it works great.

      And how, the purposeful creation of acid rain, which will kill riverine life, kill forests, and carbonate shelled animals and the animals that depend on them, as well as other oceanic life that might be affected, is worse than the problem they are trying to fix.

      I piss people off when I note that the energy retention characteristics of an atmosphere, and the so called radiative forcing that it entails are pretty settled science. And we are living in that world now. We've un-sequestered a lot of carbon and

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        If anyone doubted you were a narcissist, let them read this post. Indeed, the climate is all about you and how smart you are. Not that smart, of course, considering you don't know the cause of acid rain.

        • If anyone doubted you were a narcissist, let them read this post. Indeed, the climate is all about you and how smart you are. Not that smart, of course, considering you don't know the cause of acid rain.

          You could have posted anything, but you posted weird shit about my presumed narcissism. Even if I was a narcissist - one of the new buzzwords dreadfully overused, like incel or woke, that would have zero impact on the veracity of what I wrote. Your claims of inaccuracy are a you problem.

          The cause of acid rain is the injection into the atmosphere of sulfur dioxide and nitric oxide Most is sulfur aerosol, and returns to earth after interacting with atmospheric vapor, which then forms sulfuric acid. The res

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Presumably a geoengineering project isn't going to work by absorbing CO2 gas into the surface of the ocean. In fact, that happening would be one of the things your project is trying to prevent. So you'd do the thing by removing atmospheric carbon *indirectly*.

      For example you can encourage plankton to remove dissolved CO2 from the surface water, which would actually *decrease* ocean acidity. Atmospheric CO2 would then start to decline as the ocean's ability to absorb CO2 gas is restored. Meanwhile the abs

    • Ocean Acidification is already a known issue (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/acidification.html#:~:text=Ocean%20acidification%20refers%20to%20a,CO2)%20from%20the%20atmosphere).

      So. Yeah. As a scientist, I would have to say it is already researched. They can try to look at ways to bind/reformulate carbon in the ocean so it is not acidic, but it would also have to come with a breakdown analysis to make sure that compound doesn't just naturally revert to a simpler form.

      What I find disturbing is how 200

  • I like the idea.. (Score:3)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @10:28AM (#63824906)

    Also, pour some Coca Cola syrup into it.

  • Seeding Oceans with Iron (Score:3, Interesting)

    by canux ( 735734 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @10:34AM (#63824920)

    Past ice ages are "thought" to have, in part, been caused by a positive feedback loop where glaciers scrape iron off the Earth's crust which is then blown into the ocean causing algae blooms drawing carbon out of the atmosphere. From The Smithsonian [smithsonianmag.com]:

    "Proposed in 1990 by the late oceanographer John Martin, the hypothesis suggests that flurries of dust — swept from cold, dry landscapes like the glacial outwash where Kaplan now stood, trowel in hand — played a crucial role in the last major ice age. When this dust landed in the iron-starved Southern Ocean, Martin argued, the iron within it would have fertilized massive blooms of diatoms and other phytoplankton. Single-celled algae with intricate silica shells, diatoms photosynthesize, pulling carbon from the atmosphere and transforming it to sugar to fuel their growth. Going a step further, Martin proposed that using iron to trigger diatom blooms might help combat global warming. “Give me half a tanker of iron and I’ll give you an ice age,” he once said half-jokingly at a seminar, reportedly in his best Dr. Strangelove accent.

    Thirty years after Martin’s bold idea, scientists are still debating just how much iron dust contributed to the ice age, and whether geoengineering of the oceans—a prospect still lobbied for by some—might actually work. Although it’s now well-established that an uptick in iron fertilization occurred in the Southern Ocean during the last major ice age, for example, scientists still argue about how much it reduced carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. And while Martin’s hypothesis inspired 13 large iron fertilization experiments that boosted algae growth, only two demonstrated removal of carbon to the deep sea; the others were ambiguous or failed to show an impact, says Ken Buesseler, a marine radiochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts."

    I've heard this proposed many times recently (seeding the Oceans with Iron), but so far it looks like it is not that effective.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Why just use iron? Phytoplankton need variety of "vitamins and minerals" just like every other critter.

      Even try human poop, there's plenty of it.

      • Because iron is the limiting factor. If you're making cars and your supply of spark-plugs runs dry getting an extra shipment of timing belts and hubcaps isn't going to help.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by dpille ( 547949 )
      An important caveat to the "only two demonstrated removal of carbon to the deep sea" is that many of the remaining studies demonstrated lockup of carbon in extra biomass.

      Wouldn't it be terrible if we were trying to remove carbon from the atmosphere and ended up with a gigashit ton of tuna instead? I, for one, would eat more beef to ensure we continue to clearcut rainforest and emit cow farts at the current rate. Fucking whales, you know they're just singing about our extinction.

      • Wouldn't it be terrible if we were trying to remove carbon from the atmosphere and ended up with a gigashit ton of tuna also?

        Fixed that for you.

        And, to answer the question... that sounds marvelous to me. I'd be very happy to make sashimi a larger part of my diet! Might have to think about another ocean engineering project, though: How to pull mercury out of the oceans.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jezwel ( 2451108 )

          I'd be very happy to make sashimi a larger part of my diet! Might have to think about another ocean engineering project, though: How to pull mercury out of the oceans.

          The tuna eat the fish that eat the algae that eat the bacteria that eat the mercury, consolidate the mercury in the tuna, we eat the tuna, and when we die from mercury poisoning we just need to be buried on land, not at sea, and of course not cremated.

          There's your mercury clean-up cycle, from ocean to dirtside graveyards!

  • What could possibly go wrong? /sarcasm

  • Scientists say? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by schwit1 ( 797399 )

    Who is bankrolling this study? Scientists are people and just as corruptible as politicians and CEOs.

  • Here in the US we have an issue with agricultural runoff in the Mississippi river causing algal blooms, die-offs, and hypoxic zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

    Would it be feasible to harvest those nutrient streams before they become a problem, use them to grow diatoms, kill those, and the mountains of their corpses sequester carbon? It's effectively what happens in the ocean already, just cutting out bunch of food-chain middlemen.

  • 200 scientists have made a decision for the entire planet(8 billion people, 20 quintillion animals, even more plants). Lets do this.

  • Trees (Score:2)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 )

    An acre of trees can absorb 155 tons of CO2 per year. So...

    1. Plant a lot of trees
    2. When they get close to their natural dying point, cut them down and build things with them
    3. Or, make disposable things with them, bury them in a landfill, and capture the methane as a precursor chemical to replace the natural gas I assume we won't be pumping any more (but we still need methane as a precursor for a variety of chemical processes)

    Even if you let the trees die and rot naturally, the decaying process releases C

  • I'm pretty sure I can find 200 "scientists" somewhere who will sign a letter asking NASA to look for green cheese on the moon. The "200 scientists" ploy don't hunt no more.

  • It is crucial we remember (Score:3)

    by gTsiros ( 205624 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @05:43PM (#63826078)

    It is not a technical issue. It is an issue of the multiplication population and resource use per person.

    As long as you allow both to grow, no matter how you try to mitigate the problem, you onoy prolong the inevitable all the while digging your hole even deeper.

    All available resources WILL be used to exhaustion. This, is an inherent quality of our species.

    It is like trying to solve the problem of your child slapping you by making it wear mittens to soften the blow.

  • Polluters have trashed the world's atmosphere with carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.

    I think you misspelled "humans".

    As long as you try to make this a stupid morality play, you aren't going to get anywhere.

  • Like jaywalking and the plastic bottle propaganda. Pin the blame for industries bad actions. Acidification of ocean is caused by massive release of chemicals by industries, these can be pinpoint to a few offenders.

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